When the Tofurky research division is working on new alternative protein products, they tend to worry about taste. They tend to worry about appearance. And they tend to worry about texture.
If they’re making an alternative (i.e. no-animals-were-harmed) turk’y slice, they want to make it look, smell, and taste like the real thing, and they care about proper distribution of fat globules within the alt-slice.
But here’s a hot take, might even be true: people don’t mainly eat food for the appearance. After all, they would still eat most foods in the dark. They don’t mainly eat foods for the texture, the taste, or even for the distribution of fat globules. People eat food for the nutrition.
Who’s hungry for a hot take?
This is why people don’t eat bowls of sawdust mixed with artificial strawberry flavoring, even though we have invented perfectly good artificial strawberry flavoring. You could eat flavors straight up if you wanted to, but people don’t do that. You want ice cream, not cold dairy flavor #14, and you can tell the difference. This is a revealed preference: people don’t show up for the flavors.
A food has the same taste, smell, texture, retronasal olfaction, and general mouthfeel when you start eating it as when you finish. If you were eating for these features, you would never stop. But people do stop eating — just see how far you can get into a jar of frosting. The first bite may be heavenly, but you won’t get very deep. The gustation features of the frosting — taste, smell, etc. — don’t change. You stop eating because you are satisfied.
Assuming you buy this argument, that the real motivation behind eating food is nutrition, then why do people care about flavor (and appearance, and texture, etc.) at all? We’re so glad you asked:
People can detect some nutrients as soon as they hit the mouth: the obvious one is salt. It’s easy to figure out if a food is high in sodium; you just taste it. As a result, it’s easy to get enough salt. You just eat foods that are obviously salty until you’ve gotten enough.
But other nutrients can’t be detected immediately. If they’re bound up deep within the food and need to be both digested and absorbed, it might take minutes, maybe hours, maybe even longer, before the body registers their presence. To get enough of these nutrients, you need to be able to recognize foods that contain these nutrients, even when you can’t detect them from chewing alone.
This is where food qualities come in. Taste and texture are signs you learn that help you predict what nutrients are coming down the pipeline. Just like how you learn that thud of a candy bar at the bottom of a vending machine predicts incoming sugar. The sight of a halal van predicts greasy food imminently going down your drunk gullet. How you learn that the sight of the Lays bag means that there is something salty inside, even though you can’t detect salt just from looking at it. You also learn that the taste of lentils means that you will have more iron in your system soon, even if you can’t detect the iron from merely putting the lentils in your mouth.
To give context, this is coming from the model of psychology we described in our book, The Mind in the Wheel. In this model, motivation is the result of many different drives, each trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis, and the systems creating the drives are called governors. In eating behavior, different governors track different nutrients and try to make sure you maintain your levels, hit your micros, get enough of each.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this, but to give one example we’re confident about, there’s probably one governor that makes sure you get enough sodium, which is why you add salt to your food. There’s also at least one governor that keeps track of your fat intake, at least one governor clamoring for sugar, probably a governor for potassium. Who knows.
Governors only care about hitting their goals. Taste and texture are just the signs they use to navigate. And this is where the problem comes in.
Consider that for all its flaws, turkey is really nutritious. Two slices or 84 grams of turkey contains 29% of the Daily Value (DV) for Vitamin B12, 46% of the DV for Selenium, 49% of the DV for Vitamin B6, and 61% of the DV for Niacin (vitamin B3).
Tofurkey is not. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t contain any selenium or B vitamins. Not clear if it contains zinc or phosphorus either. Maybe this is wrong, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear that Tofurkey are trying to nutrition-match. And that may be the key to why these products are still not very popular. If you try to compete with turkey on taste and texture, but people choose foods based on nutrition, you’re gonna have a problem.
This is just one anecdote, but: our favorite alternative protein is Morningstar Farms vegetarian sausage links. And guess what food product contains 25% DV of vitamin B6, 50% DV of niacin, and 130% DV of vitamin B12 per two links? Outstanding in its field.
In the Vegan War Room
We believe this has strategic implications. So please put on your five-star vegan general hat, as we lead you into your new imagined role as commander of the faithful.
General, as you may be aware, the main way our culture attempts to change behavior is by introducing conflict. We attempt to make people skinny by mocking them, which pits the shame governor against the hunger governors. We control children by keeping them inside at recess or making them stay after class, which pits the governors that make them act up in class against the governors that make them want to run around with their friends. Or we control them by saying, no dessert until you eat your brussel sprouts.
This is an unfortunate holdover from the behaviorists, who once dominated the study of psychology. In behaviorism, you get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish. Naturally when they asked themselves “how to get less of a behavior?” the answer they came up with was “punish!” But this is a fundamentally incomplete picture of psychology. Reward and punishment don’t really exist — motivation is all about governors learning what will increase or decrease their errors. While you can decide to pit governors against each other, this approach has serious limitations. It just doesn’t work all that well.
First of all, conflict between governors is experienced as anxiety. So while you can change someone’s behaviour by causing conflict, you’ll also make them seriously anxious. This is fine, we guess, if you hate them and want them to feel terrible all the time. But it’s more than a little antisocial.
Anyone who’s the target of punishment will see what is happening. They don’t want to feel anxious all the time, and they especially don’t want to feel anxious about doing what to them are normal, everyday things. If you try to change their behavior in this way, they will find you annoying and do their best to avoid you, so you can’t create so much conflict inside them. Imagine how much less effective this strategy is, compared to finding a method of convincing that people don’t avoid, or that they might even actively seek out.
On top of this, conflict dies out without constant maintenance. In the short term you can convince people that they will be judged if they have premarital sex, but this lesson will quickly fade, especially if they see people getting busy without consequence. The only way to keep this in check is to run a constant humiliation campaign, where people are reminded that they will be shamed if they ever step out of line. This is expensive, neverending, and, for the obvious reasons, unpopular. Scolding can work in limited ways, but nobody likes a scold.
Many attempts to convince people to become vegan, or even to simply eat less meat, follow this strategy — they try to make people eat less meat by taking the governors that normally vote for meat-eating (several nutritional governors, and perhaps some other governors, like the one for status) and opposing them with some other drive.
You can tell people that they are bad people for eating meat, you can say that they will be judged, shamed, or ostracized. You can tell them that eating meat is bad for their health or bad for the environment. This might even be true. But just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s motivating. This strategy won’t work all that well. It only causes conflict, because the drives that vote against eating meat will be strenuously opposed by the drives that have always been voting to eat meat to begin with.
But you don’t need to fight your drives. Better to provide a substitute.
No one takes a horse to their dentist appointments anymore. Cars are just vegan carriages; hence “horseless carriage”. We used to kill whales for oil. We don’t do that anymore, and it’s not because people became more compassionate. It’s because whale oil lamps got beat out by better alternatives, like electric lighting. People substitute one good for another when it is either strictly better at satisfying the same need(s), or better in some way — for example, not as good, but much cheaper, or much faster, or much more convenient.
Whale oil lamps burned bright, but with a disagreeable fishy smell. Imagine if in the early days of alternative lighting, they had tried to give whale oil substitutes like kerosene or electric lights the same fishy smell, imagining that this would make it easier to compete with whale oil. No! They just tried to address the need the whale oil was addressing, namely light, without trying to capture any of the incidental features of whale oil. They offered a superior product, or sometimes one that was inferior but cheaper, and that was enough to do the job. We don’t run whale ships off Nantucket any more.
So if you want people to eat less meat, if you want more people to become vegan, you shouldn’t roll out alternative turkey, salami, or anything else. You should provide substitutes, competing superior products, that satisfy the same drives without any reference to the original product. Ta-daaaa.
No one eats yogurt because they have an innate disposition for yogurt. Instead, they eat it because yogurt fulfills some of their needs. If they could get those needs met through a different product, they probably would, especially if the alternative is faster / easier / cheaper.
For the sake of illustration, let’s say that turkey contains just three nutrients, vitamins X, Y, and Z.
If you make an alternative turkey that matches the real thing in taste and texture, but provides none of the same nutrients, then despite the superficial similarity, you’re not even competing in the same product category. It’s like selling cardboard boxes that look like cars but that can’t actually get you to work — however impressive they might look, they don’t meet the need. People will not be inclined to replace their real turkey with your alternative one, at least not without considerable outside motivation. You will be working uphill.
Making a really close match can actually be counterproductive. If an alternative food looks/tastes/smells very similar to an original food, but it doesn’t contain the same nutrition, this is basically the same as gaslighting your governors. And the better the taste match, the more confusing this is.
Think about it from the perspective of the selenium governor. You’re trying to encourage behaviors that keep you in the green zone on your selenium levels, mostly by predicting which foods will lead to more selenium later. But things have recently become really confusing. About half the time you taste turkey flavor and texture, you get more selenium a few hours later. The other half of the time, you encounter turkey flavor and texture, but the selenium never arrives.
By eating alternative proteins that taste like the “real thing”, you end up seriously confusing your governors, with basically no benefit.
We recently tried one of these new vegan boxed eggs. It did have the appearance of scrambled eggs, and it curdled much like scrambled eggs. It even tasted somewhat like scrambled eggs. But the experience of eating it was overall terrible. Not the flavor — the deep sense that this was not truly filling, not a food product. Despite simulating the experience of eggs quite closely, we did not want it. Maybe because it was not truly nutritious.
If you make an alternative turkey that contains vitamins X, Y, and Z, you will at least be providing a real substitute. People will have a natural motivation to eat your alternative turkey. But if you do this, you’re still in direct competition with the original turkey. You’re in its niche, it is an away game for you and a home game for turkey. You have to convince the consumer’s mind that your alt-turkey is worth switching to, and that takes a lot of convincing. People prefer the familiar. Unless the new product is much better in some way, they won’t switch.
If you are trying to replicate turkey, you need to make a matching blob that matches real turkey on all the dimensions people might care about. A product exactly like that is hard to make at all, and forget about doing it while also being cheap, available, and satisfying. This is why it’s an uphill battle, you’re trying to meet turkey exactly.
Those of us who have never tasted tukrey are in ignorance still, our subconscious has no idea that turkey slices would be a great source of vitamin X. We’re not tempted. But people who have tried turkey before have tasted the deli meat of knowledge, and there’s no losing that information once you have it. Vitamin X governor gets what vitamin X governor wants, so these people will always feel called to the best source of vitamin X they’re aware of. You’ll never convince the vitamin X governor that turkey is a bad source of vitamin X; you’ll get more mileage out of giving it a better way to get what it wants!
So instead of shaming, or offering mock meats, the winning strategy might be to just come up with new, original vegan foods that are very good sources of vitamins X, Y, and/or Z. Just make vitamin X drinks, vitamin Y candies, and vitamin Z spread. If you don’t try to mimic turkey, then you’re not in competition with turkey in any way. You don’t need to convince people that it’s better than turkey — you just need to convince them that it’s nutritious and delicious. Why try to copy turkey when you can beat it at its own game?
You don’t need alt-turkey to be all turkey things to all turkey people. As long as people get their needs covered in a way that satisfies, they’ll be happy.
It seems like it would be easier to make a good source of phosphorus, than to make a good source of phosphorus PLUS make it resemble yogurt as much as possible. Alternative proteins that try to mimic existing foods will always be at a disadvantage in terms of quality, taste, and cost, simply because trying to do two things is harder than doing one thing really well. You’ll lose out on a lot of tradeoffs.
If we created new food products that contain all the nutrients that people currently get from meat, except tastier, cheaper, or even just more convenient, people would slowly add these foods to their diet. Over time, these foods would displace turkey and other meats as superior substitutes, just like electric lights replaced gas lamps, or like cell phones eclipsed the telegraph. Without even thinking about it, people will soon be eating much less meat than they did before. And if these new foods are good enough sources of the nutrients we need, then in a generation or two people may not be eating meat at all. After all, meat is a bit of a hassle to produce and to cook. Not like my darling selenium drink.
We see this already in some natural examples. Tofu is much more popular in countries like China, Korea, Japan, where it is simply seen as a food, than it is in the US, where it is treated as a meat substitute. You don’t frame your substitute as being in the same category as your competitors unless you really have to. That’s just basic marketing.
We have a friend whose family is from Cuba. She tells a story about how her grandmother was bemused when avocado toast got really popular in the 2010s. When asked why she found this so strange, her grandmother explained that back in Cuba, the only reason you would put avocado on your toast was if you were so dirt poor you couldn’t afford butter. It was an extremely shameful thing to have to put avocado on your toast, avocados grew on trees in the back yard and were basically free. If you were so very poor as to end up in this situation, you would at least try to hide it.
In Cuba, where avocado was seen as a substitute for butter, it was automatically seen as inferior. But when it appeared in 2010s America in the context of a totally new dish, it was wildly popular. And in terms of food replacement, avocado is a stealth vegan smash hit, way more successful than nearly any other plant-based product. It wasn’t framed that way, but in a practical sense, what did avocado displace? Mostly dairy- and egg-based spreads like butter, cream cheese, and mayonnaise. There may be no other food that has led to such an intense increase in the effective amount of veganism, even if the people switching away from these spreads didn’t see it that way. They just wanted avocado on the merits.
This product space is usually thought of as “alternative proteins”. Which is fine, protein is one thing that everyone needs. But a better perspective might be, “vegan ways to get where you’re going”. And just because some of these targets happen to be bundled together in old-fashioned flesh-and-blood meat, doesn’t mean they need to be bundled together in the same ways in the foods of the future.
“Alright, gang, let’s split up and search for clues.”
— Fred Jones, Scooby-Doo
This has been our proposal for a new paradigm for psychology.
If the proposal is more or less right, then this is the start of a scientific revolution. And while we can’t make any guarantees, it’s always good to plan for success. So in case these ideas do turn out successful, then: welcome to psychology’s first paradigm, let’s discuss what we do from here.
In looking for a paradigm, we’re looking for new ways to describe the mysteries that pop up on the regular. When a good description arrives, some of those mysteries will become puzzles, problems that look like they can be solved with the tools at hand, that look like they will have a clear solution, the kind of solution we’ll recognize when we see it. Because a shared paradigm gives us a shared commitment to the same rules, standards, and assumptions, it can let us move very quickly.
All that is to say is that if this paradigm has any promise, then there should be a lot of normal science, a lot of puzzle-solving to do. A new paradigm is like an empty expert-level sudoku: there’s a kind of internal logic, but also a lot of tricky blanks that need filling in. So, we need your help. Here are some things you can do.
Experimentation
First, experimentalists can help us develop methods for figuring out how many cybernetic drives people have, what each drive controls, and different parameters of how they work. In the last twosections we did our best to speculate about what these methods might look like, but there are probably a lot of good ideas we missed.
Then, we need people to actually go out and use these methods. The first task is probably to discover all of the different drives that exist in human psychology, to fill out the “periodic table” of motivation as completely as we can. Finding all of the different drives will generate many new mysteries, which will lead to more lines of research and more discoveries.
We will also want to study other animals. There are a few reasons to study animals in addition to humans. First of all, most animals don’t have the complex social drives that humans do. The less social an animal is, the easier it will be to study its non-social drives in isolation. Second, it’s possible to have more control over an animal’s environment. We can raise an animal so that it never encounters certain things, or only encounters some things together. Finally, we can use somewhat more invasive techniques with animals than we can with humans.
Some animals have the bad emotions.
Computational Modeling
Computational models will be especially important for developing a better understanding of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. With a model, we can test different changes to the design and parameters, and see which kinds of models and what parameter values lead to the behaviors and tendencies that we recognize as depression. This will ultimately help us determine how many different types of depression there are, come to an understanding of their etiology, and in time develop interventions and treatments.
Computational models should provide similar insight into tendencies like addiction and self-harm. The first step is to show that models of this kind can give rise to behavior that looks like addiction. Then, we see what other predictions the model makes about addictive behavior, and about behavior in general, and we test those predictions with studies and experiments.
If we discover more than one computational model that leads to addictive behavior, we can compare the different models to real-world cases of addiction, and see which is more accurate. Once we have models that provide a reasonably good fit, we can use them to develop new approaches for treatment and prevention.
Biology and Chemistry
Those of you who tend more towards biology or neuroscience can help figure out exactly how these concepts are implemented in our biology. Understanding the computational side of how the mind works is important, but the possible interventions we can take (like treating depression) will be limited if we don’t know how each part of the computation is carried out in an organism.
For example: every governor tracks and controls some kind of signal. The fear governor tracks something like “danger”. This is a complicated neurological construct that probably doesn’t correspond to some specific part of biology. But other governors probably track biological signals that may be even as simple as the concentrations of specific minerals or hormones in the bloodstream.
For example, the hormone leptin seems to be involved in regulating hunger. Does one of the hunger governors act to control leptin levels in our blood? Or is leptin involved in some other part of the hunger-control process? What do the hunger, thirst, sleep, and other basic governors control, and what are their set points?
Biologists may be able to answer some of these questions. Some of these questions may even have already been answered in neuroscience, biology, or medicine, in which case the work will be in bundling them together under this new perspective.
Design
Running studies and inventing better methods sounds very scientific and important, but we suspect the most important contributions might actually come from graphic design.
The first “affinity table” was developed in 1718 by Étienne François Geoffroy. Substances are identified by their alchemical symbol and grouped by “affinity”.
At the head of each column is a substance, and below it are listed all the substances that are known to combine with it. “The idea that some substances could unite more easily than others was not new,” reports French Wikipedia, “but the credit for bringing together all the available information into a large general table, later called the affinity table, goes to Geoffroy.”
Here is a later affinity table with one additional column, the Tabula Affinitatum, commissioned around 1766 for the apothecary’s shop of the Grand Duke of Florence, now to be found in the Museo Galileo:
These old attempts at classification are charming, and it’s tempting to blame this on the fact that they didn’t understand that elements fall into some fairly distinct categories. But chemical tables remained lacking even after the discovery of the periodic law.
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev is often credited with inventing the periodic table, but he did not immediately give us the periodic table as we know it today. His original 1869 table looked like this:
And his update in 1871 still looked like this:
It wasn’t until 1905 that we got something resembling the modern form, the first 32-column table developed by Alfred Werner:
They tried a lot of crazy things on the way to the periodic table we know and love, and not all of these ideas made it. We’ll share just one example here, Otto Theodor Benfey’s spiral periodic table from 1964:
When a new paradigm arrives, the first tools for thinking about it, whether tables, charts, diagrams, metaphors, or anything else, are not going to be very good. Instead we start with something that is both a little confused and a little confusing, but that half-works, and iterate from there.
The first affinity table by Étienne François Geoffroy in 1718 was not very good. It was missing dozens of elements. It contained bizarre entries like “absorbent earth” and “oily principle”. And it was a simple list of reactions, with no underlying theory to speak of.
But it was still good enough for Fourcroy, a later chemist, to write:
No discovery is more brilliant in this era of great works and continued research, none has done more honor to this century of renewed and perfected chemistry, none finally has led to more important results than that which is relative to the determination of affinities between bodies, and to the exposition of the degrees of this force between different natural substances. It is to Geoffroy the elder … that we owe this beautiful idea of the table of chemical ratios or affinities. … We must see in this incorrect and inexact work only an ingenious outline of one of the most beautiful and most useful discoveries which have been made. This luminous idea served as a torch to guide the steps of chemists, and it produced a large number of useful works. … chemists have constantly added to this first work; they have corrected the errors, repaired the omissions, and completed the gaps.
It took about two hundred years, and the efforts of many thousands of chemists, to get us from Geoffroy’s first affinity table to the periodic table we use today. So we should not worry if our first efforts are incomplete, or a little rough around the edges. We should expect this to take some effort, we should be patient.
Better tools do not happen by accident. We do not get them for free — someone has to make them. And if you want, that someone can be you.
That’s all, folks!
Thank you for reading to the end of the series! We hope you enjoyed.
We need your help, your questions, your disagreement. Consider reaching out to discuss collaborating, or to just toss around ideas, especially if they’re ideas that could lead to empirical tests. You can contact us by email or join the constant fray of public discussion on twitter.
If you find these ideas promising and want to see more of this research happen, consider donating. Our research is funded through Whylome, a a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that relies on independent donations for support. Donations will go towards further theoretical, modeling, and empirical work.
The researchers recruited fourteen men (mean age: 28 years old) and invited them back to the lab to eat “a homogenous mixed-macronutrient meal (pizza)”. The authors note that “this study was open to males and females but no females signed up.”
They invited each man to visit the lab two separate times. On one occasion, the man was asked to eat pizza until “comfortably full”. The other time, he was asked to eat pizza until he “could not eat another bite”.
When asked to eat until “comfortably full”, the men ate an average of about 1500 calories of pizza. But when asked to eat until they “could not eat another bite”, the men ate an average of more than 3000 calories.
Study Materials
The authors view this as a study about nutrition, but we saw it and immediately went, “Aha! Pizza psychology!”
While this isn’t a lot of data — only fourteen men, and they only tried the challenges one time each — it shows some promise as a first step towards a personality measure of hunger and satiety, because it measures both how hungry these boys are, and also how much they can eat before they have to stop.
When asked to aim for “could not eat another bite”, the men could on average eat about twice as much pizza compared to when they were asked to aim for “comfortably full”. But there was quite a lot of variation in this ratio for different men:
All the men ate more when they were asked to eat as much as they could, than when they were asked to eat as much as they liked. But there’s a lot of diversity in the ratio between those two values. When instructed to eat until they “could not eat another bite”, some men ate only a little bit more than they ate ad libitum. But one man ate almost three times as much when he was told to go as hard as he can.
People have some emotions that drive them to eat (collectively known as hunger), and other emotions that drive them to stop eating (collectively known as satiety). While these pizza measurements are very rough, they suggest something about the relationship between these two sets of drives in these men. If nothing else, it’s reassuring to see that for each individual, the “could not eat another bite” number is always higher.
It’s a little early to start using this as a personality measure, but with a little legwork to make it reliable, we might find something interesting. It could be the case, for example, that there are some men with very little daylight between “comfortably full” and “could not eat another bite”, and other men for whom these two occasions are like day and night. That would suggest that some men’s hunger governor(s) are quite strong compared to their satiety governor(s), and other men’s are relatively weak.
The general principle of personality in cybernetic psychology is “some drives are stronger than others”. So for personality, we want to invent methods that can get at the question of how strong different drives are, and how they stack up against each other. Get in loser, we’re making a tier list of the emotions.
We may not be able to look at a drive and say exactly how strong it is, since we don’t yet know how to measure the strength of a drive. We don’t even know the units. When this is eventually discovered, it will probably come from an unexpected place, like how John Dalton’s work in meteorology gave him the idea for the atomic theory.
But we can still get a decent sense of how strong one drive is compared to another drive. This is possible whenever we can take two drives and make them fight.
Personality psychology be like
Some drives are naturally in opposition — this pizza study is a good example. The satiety governor(s) exist specifically to check the hunger governor(s). Hunger was invented to start eating, and satiety was invented to make it stop. So it’s easy to set up a situation where the two of them are in conflict.
Or somewhat easy. We think it’s more accurate to model the pizza study as the interaction between three (groups of) emotions. When asked to eat until “comfortably full”, the hunger governor voted for “eat pizza” until its error was close to zero, then it stopped voting for “eat pizza”, so the man stopped. That condition was simple and mainly involved just the one governor.
The other condition was more complex. When asked to eat until they “could not eat another bite”, the hunger governor first voted for “eat pizza” until its error was close to zero. Then, some kind of “please the researchers” governor(s) kept voting for “eat pizza” to please the researchers.
At some point this started running up against the satiety governor. The satiety governor tracks something like how full you are, so as the man started to get too full, the satiety governor started voting against “eat pizza”. The man kept eating until the vote from the “please the researchers” governor(s) was just as strong as the vote from the satiety governor, at which point the two votes cancel out and the man could not eat another bite.
This reveals the problem. In one sense, hunger and satiety are naturally in opposition. Hunger tries to make you eat enough and satiety tries to make sure you don’t eat enough too much. But in a healthy person, there’s plenty of daylight between the set points of these two drives, and they don’t come into conflict.
Same thing with hot and cold — the drive that tries to keep you warm is in some sense “in opposition” to the drive that tries to keep you from overheating, but they don’t normally fight. If you have a sane and normal mind, you don’t put on 20 sweaters, then overheat, then in a fit of revenge take off all of your clothes and jump in a snowbank, etc. These drives oppose each other along a single axis, but when they are working correctly, they keep the variable they care about in a range that they agree on. Hunger and satiety, and all the paired governors, are more often allies than enemies.
But any two drives can come into conflict when the things they want to do become mutually exclusive, or even just trade off against each other. Even if you can do everything you want, the drives will still need to argue about who gets to go first. Take something you want, anything at all, and put it next to a tiger. Congratulations, fear is now in conflict with that original desire.
Many people experience this conflict almost every morning:
This is actually a more complicated situation, where the governors have formed factions. The pee governor wants to let loose on your bladder. But your hygiene governor votes against wetting the bed. Together they settle on a compromise where you get up and pee in the toilet instead, since this satisfies both of their goals (bladder relief + hygienic).
But the governor that keeps you warm, the sleep governor (who wants to drift back into unconsciousness), and any other governors with an interest in being cozy, strenuously oppose this policy. They want you to stay in your warm, comfy bed. So you are at an impasse until the bladder governor eventually has such a strong error signal — you have to take a leak so bad — that it has the votes to overrule the cozy coalition and motivate you to get up and go to the bathroom.
The point is, the bladder governor, warmth governor, and sleep governor don’t fundamentally have anything to do with each other. They all care about very different things. But when you have to pee in the middle of the night, their interests happen to be opposed. They draw up into factions, and this leads to a power struggle — one so universal that there are memes about it. And as is always the case in politics, a power struggle is a good chance to get a sense of the relative strength of the factions involved.
If you met someone who said they didn’t relate to this — they always get up in the middle of the night to pee without any hesitation or inner struggle — this would suggest that their bladder governor is very strong, or that their warmth and/or sleep governors are unusually weak. Whatever the case, their bladder governor wins such disagreements so quickly that there doesn’t even appear to be a dispute.
In contrast, if your friend confesses that they have such a hard time getting up that they sometimes wet the bed, this suggests that their bladder governor, and probably their hygiene governor, are unusually weak compared to the governors voting for them to stay in bed.
To understand these methods, we have to understand the difference between two kinds of “strength”.
In general when we say that a drive is strong, we mean that it can meet its goals, it can vote for the actions it wants. This is why we can learn something about the relative strength of two drives by letting them fight — we can present the organism with mutually exclusive options (truth or dare?) and see which option it picks. If we have some reasonable idea which drive would pick which option, we know which drive is stronger from which option is picked.
However! Another way a drive can be strong is that it can have a big error signal in that moment. If you are ravenously hungry, you will eat before anything else. If you are in excruciating pain, you will pull your hand off the stove before doing anything else. This kind of urgency tells us that the current error is big, but it doesn’t tell us much about the governor.
A drive does get a stronger vote when its variable is further off target. But it’s also true that for a given person, some drives seem stronger in all situations.
The normal sense of strength gets at the fact that a governor can be stronger or weaker for a given error. Some people can go to sleep hungry without any problem. For other people, even the slightest hint of appetite will keep them awake. When we talk about someone being aggressive, we mean that they will drop other concerns if they see a chance to dominate someone; if we talk about someone being meek, we mean the opposite.
The current strength of any drive is a function of the size of its current error signal and the overall strength or “weight” of the governor. Unfortunately, we don’t know what that function is. Also, it might be a function of more than just those two things. Uh-oh!
Ideally, what we would do is hold the size of the error constant. If we could make sure that the error on the salt governor is 10 units, and the error on the sweet governor is 10 units, then we could figure out which governor is stronger by seeing which the person would choose first, skittles or olives. This is based on the assumption that the strength of the vote for each option is a combination of the size of the errors and the strength of the governor itself. Since in this hypothetical we know that the strength of the errors is exactly the same, the difference in choice should be entirely the result of the difference in the strength of the governors.
Unfortunately we don’t know how to do that either. We don’t know how to measure the errors directly, let alone how to hold the size of the errors constant.
But we can use techniques that should make the size of some error approximately constant, and base our research on that. The closer the approximation, the better.
The important insight here is that even when we can’t make measurements in absolute terms, we can often make ordinal comparisons. “How strong is this drive” is an impossible question to answer until we know more about how strength is implemented mechanically, but we can make very reasonable guesses about which of two drives is stronger, what order their strengths are in, i.e. ordinal measurements.
We can do this two ways: we can compare one of your drives to everyone else’s version of that same drive, or we can compare one of your drives to your other drives.
Compare One of Your Drives to Everyone Else’s Version of that Same Drive
The first is that we can compare one of a person’s drives to the same drive in other people.
It’s reasonable to ask if your hunger, fear, pain, or shame drive is stronger or weaker than average. To do this, we can look at two or more individuals and ask if the drive is stronger for one of them or for the other.
This will offer a personality measure like: your salt governor is stronger than 98% of people. You a salty boy.
Again, to get a measure of strength, we need to make everyone’s errors approximately constant. One way we can make errors approximately constant is by fully satisfying the drive. So if we identify a drive, like the drive for salt, we can exhaust the drive by letting people eat as much salt or salty food(s) as they want. Now all their errors should be close to zero. Then we can see how long it takes before they go eat something salty again. If someone goes to get salty foods sooner, then other things being equal, this is a sign that their salt governor is unusually strong.
This won’t be perfectly the same, and other things will not be perfectly equal. Some people’s salt error may increase more quickly than others’, like maybe they metabolize salt faster, or something. So after 5 hours without salty foods, some people’s error may be much bigger than others’. But it should be approximately equal, and certainly we would learn something important if we saw one guy who couldn’t go 10 minutes without eating something salty, and someone else who literally never seemed to seek it out.
When we say things like, “Johnnie is a very social person. If he has to spend even 30 minutes by himself he gets very lonely, so he’s always out and spending time with people. But Suzie will go weeks or even months without seeing anyone,” this is a casual version of the same reasoning, and we think it’s justified. It may not get exactly at the true nature of personality, but it’s a start.
When we figure out what the targets are for some governors, we’ll be able to do one better. For example, let’s imagine that we find out that thirst is the error for a governor that controls blood osmolality, and through careful experimentation, we find out that almost everyone’s target for blood osmolality is 280 mOsm/kg. Given the opportunity, behavior drives blood osmolality to 280 mOsm/kg and then stops.
If we measure people’s blood osmolality, we can dehydrate them to the point where their blood osmolality is precisely 275 mOsm/kg. We know that this will be an error of 5 mOsm/kg, because that’s 5 units less than the target. Then we would know almost exactly what their error is, and we could estimate the relative strength of their thirst governor by measuring how hard they fight to get a drink of water.
On that note, it’s possible that a better measure than time would be effort. For example, you could take a bunch of rats and figure out the ideal cage temperature for each of them. Separately, you teach them that pushing a lever will raise the temperature of their cage by a small amount each time they press it.
Then, you set the cage temperature 5 degrees colder than they prefer. This should give them all errors of similar magnitude — they are all about 5 degrees colder than they’d like. Then you give them the same lever they were trained on. But this time, it’s disconnected. You count how many times they press the lever before they give up. This will presumably give you a rough measure of how much each rat is bothered by being 5 degrees below target, and so presumably an estimate of the strength of that governor. If nothing else, you should observe some kind of individual difference.
Compare One of Your Drives to Your Other Drives
The second approach is to ask how your drives compare to each other, basically a ranking. We can look at a single person and ask, in this person, is drive A stronger than drive B?
The main way to do this is to give the person a forced choice between two options, one choice that satisfies governor A, and the other that satisfies governor B. This doesn’t have to be cruel — you can let them take both options, you just have to just make them choose which they want to do first.
This would offer a personality measure like: you are more driven by cleanliness than by loneliness, which is why you keep blowing off all your friends to stay in and scrub your toilet.
There are some drives that make us want to be comfortable and other drives that make us want to be fashionable; there are at least some tradeoffs between comfort and fashion; if you reflect on each of the people in your life, it’s likely that you already know which coalition of drives tends to be stronger in each person.
Every time you see someone skip work to play videogames, refuse to shower even when it ruins all their friendships, blow up their life to have an affair with the 23-year-old at the office, or stay up late memorizing digits of pi, you are making this kind of personality judgment implicitly. People have all kinds of different drives, and you can learn a lot about which ones are strongest by seeing which drives are totally neglected, and which drives lead people to blithely sacrifice all other concerns, as though they’re blind to the consequences.
The Bene Gesserit, a sect of eugenicist, utopian nuns from the Dune universe, use a simplified version of this method in their famous human awareness test, better known as the gom jabbar. Candidates are subjected to extreme pain and ordered not to pull away, at penalty of taking a poisoned needle in the neck. In his success, Paul demonstrates that some kind of self-control governor is much stronger than his pain governor, even when his pain error is turned way up.
“What’s in the box?” “A personality test.”
But no shade to the Bene Gesserit, this is not a very precise measure. By turning the pain governor’s error extremely high, they can show that a candidate has exceptional self-control. But this doesn’t let them see if self-control is in general stronger than pain, because the error gets so huge. To compare the strength of governors, you ideally want the error signals to be as similar as possible.
As before, the best way to get at strength is to take two drives, try to make their errors as similar as possible, and then see which drive gets priority. Other things being equal, that drive must be stronger.
When we were trying to compare personality between people, this was relatively easy. If nothing else, we were at least looking at the same error. We can’t get an exact measure of the error, but we could at least say, both of these people have gone 10 hours without eating, or 20 hours without sleep, or are ten degrees hotter than they find comfortable. These are the same kinds of things and they are equal for both people.
But to compare two governors within a single person, we are comparing two different errors, and we have no idea what the units are. So it may be hard to demonstrate differences between the strength of the governors when those differences are small. If one error is ten times stronger than the other, then we assume that the governor behind that error will win nearly all competitions between the two of them. If one error is 1.05 times stronger than the other, that governor has an edge, but will often get sidelined when there are other forces at play.
But like the common-sense examples above, it should be possible to make some comparisons, especially when differences are clear. For example, if we deprive a person of both sleep and food for 48 hours (with their consent of course), then offer them a forced choice between food and sleep, and they take the food, that suggests that their drive to eat may be stronger than their drive to sleep. This is especially true if we see that other people in the same situation take the option to sleep instead.
If we deprive the person of sleep for 48 hours and food for only 4 hours, and they still choose the food over sleep, that is even better evidence that their drive to eat is stronger than their drive to sleep, probably a lot stronger.
While these methods are designed to discover something inside an individual person, they might also shed some light on personality differences between people. For example, we might find that in most people, the sugar governor is stronger than the salt governor. But maybe for you, your salt governor is much stronger than your sugar governor. That tells us something about your personality in isolation (that one drive is stronger than another), and also tells us something about your personality compared to other people (you have an uncommon ordering of drives).
Return to Pizza Study
The pizza study is interesting because it kind of combines these techniques.
Each person was compared on two tasks — “comfortably full” and “could not eat another bite”, which gives us a very rough sense of how strong their hunger and satiety governors are. If you ate 10 slices to get to “comfortably full” and only 12 slices to get to “could not eat another bite”, your satiety governor is probably pretty strong, since it kicks in not long after you ate as much as you need. (There could be other interpretations, but you get the gist.)
In addition, each person can be compared to all the other people. Some men could eat only a little more when they were asked to get to “could not eat another bite”. But one man ate almost three times as much as his “comfortably full”. This man’s satiety governor is probably weaker than average. There are certainly other factors involved, but it still took a long time before that governor forced him to stop eating, suggesting it is weak.
A final note on strength. The strength of a governor is probably somewhat innate. But it may also be somewhat the result of experience. If someone is more motivated by safety than by other drives, some of that may be genetic, but some of that may be learned. It would not be ridiculous to think that your mind might be able to tune things so that if you have been very unsafe in your life, you will pay more attention to safety in the future.
Even the part that’s genetic (or otherwise innate) still has to be implemented in some specific way. When one of your governors is unusually strong, does that governor have a stronger connection to the selector? Does it have the same connection as usual, but it can shout louder? Does it shout as loud as normal, but it can shout twice as often? We don’t know the details yet, but keep in mind that all of this will be implemented in biology and will include all kinds of gritty details.
Deeper Questions
People can differ in more ways than just having some of their drives be stronger than others. For example, some people are more active than other people in general, more active for every kind of drive. They do more things every single day.
Some people seem to get more happiness from the same level of accomplishment. For some people, cooking dinner is a celebration. For others, routine is routine.
Some people seem more anxious by default. Even a small thing will make them nervous.
These seem like they might be other dimensions on which people can differ, and they don’t seem like they are linked to specific governors.
Studying the strength of the governors is nice because the governors are all built on basically the same blueprint, so the logic needed to puzzle out one of them should mostly work to puzzle out any of the others. The methods used to study one governor should work to study all of them, only minor tweaks required. If you find techniques to measure the strength of one governor, you should be able to use those techniques to measure the strength of any governor.
But other ways in which people differ seem more idiosyncratic. They are probably the result of different parameters that tune features that are more global, each of which interacts with the whole system in a unique and different way. So we will probably need to invent new methods for each of them.
That means we can’t yet write a section on the different methods that will be useful. These methods still need to be invented. And we might only get to these methods once we have learned most of what there is to know about the differences in strength between the governors, and have to track down the remaining unexplained differences between people. But we can give a few examples to illustrate what some of these questions and methods might look like.
Learning
Every governor has to have some way of learning which behaviors increase/decrease their errors. We don’t know exactly how this learning works yet, but we can point to a few questions that we think will be fruitful.
For example, is learning “both ways”?
The hot governor (keeps you from getting too hot) and the cold governor (keeps you from getting too cold) both care about the same variable, body temperature. Certainly if you are too cold and you turn on a gas fireplace, your cold governor will notice that this corrects its error and will learn that turning on the gas fireplace is a good option. So when you get too cold in the future, that governor will sometimes vote for “turn on the gas fireplace”.
But what if you are too hot and you turn on the gas fireplace? Well, your hot governor will notice that this increases its error, and will learn that this is a bad option, which it will vote against if you’re in danger of getting too hot.
What does your cold governor learn in this situation? Maybe it learns the same thing your hot governor does — that the gas fireplace increases temperature. The hot governor thinks that’s a bad outcome, but the cold governor thinks it’s a good outcome. If so, then next time you are cold, the cold governor might vote for you to turn on the gas fireplace.
But maybe a governor only learns when its error is changed. After all, each governor only really cares about the error it’s trying to send to zero. And if that error isn’t changed, maybe the governor doesn’t pay attention. If the error is very small, maybe that governor more or less turns off, and stops paying attention, to conserve energy. Then it might not do any learning at all.
If this were the case, the cold governor shouldn’t learn from any actions you take when you’re too hot, even when these actions influence your body temperature. And the hot governor shouldn’t learn from anything you do when you’re too cold, same deal.
You could test this by putting a mouse in a cage that is uncomfortably hot, and that contains a number of switches. Each switch will either temporarily increase or temporarily decrease the temperature of the cage. With this setup, the mouse should quickly learn which switches to trip (makes the cage cooler) and which switches to avoid (makes the cage even more uncomfortably hot).
Once the mouse has completely learned the switches, then you make the cage uncomfortably cold instead, and see what happens. If the cold governor has also been learning, then the mouse should simply invert its choice of switches, and will be just as good at regulating the cage temperature as before.
But if the cold governor wasn’t paying close attention to the hot governor’s mistakes, then the mouse will have to do some learning to catch up. If the cold governor wasn’t learning from the hot governor’s mistakes at all, then the mouse will be back at square one, and might even have to re-learn all the switches through trial and error.
We definitely might expect the former outcome, but you have to admit that the latter outcome would be pretty interesting.
The Model of Happiness
Or consider the possibility that happiness might drive learning.
This would explain why happiness exists in the first place. It’s not just pleasant, it’s a signal to flag successful behavior and make sure that it’s recorded. When something makes you happy, that signals some system to record the link between the recent action and the error correction.
This would also explain why it often feels like we are motivated by happiness as a reward. We aren’t actually motivated by happiness itself, but when something has made us happy, we tend to do it more often in the future.
Previously we said that happiness is equal to the change in an error. In short, when you correct one of your errors, that creates a proportional amount of happiness. This happiness sticks around for a while but slowly decays over time.
That’s a fine model as a starting point, but it’s very simple. Here’s a slightly more complicated model of happiness, which may be more accurate than the model we suggested earlier. Maybe happiness is equal to the reduction in error times the total sum of all errors, like so:
happiness = delta_error * sum_errors
If happiness is just the result of the correction of an error, then you get the same amount of happiness from correcting that error in any circumstance. But that seems a little naïve. A drink of water in the morning after a night at a five-star hotel is an accomplishment, but the same drink of water drawn while hungry and in pain, lost in the wilderness, is a much greater feat. Remembering the strategy that led to that success might be more important.
If you multiply the correction by the total amount of error, then correcting an error when you are in a rough situation overall leads to a much greater reward, which would encourage the governors to put a greater weight on successes that are pulled off in difficult situations. If you correct an error when all your other errors are near zero, you will get some happiness. But if you are more out of alignment generally — more tired, cold, lonely, or whatever — you get more happiness from the same correction.
This might explain fetishes. Why do so many sexual fetishes include things that cause fear, pain, disgust, or embarrassment? Surely the fear, pain, disgust, and embarrassment governors would vote against these things.
We have to assume that the horny governor is voting for these things. The question is, why would it vote for anything more than getting your rocks off? Why would an orgasm plus embarrassment be in any way superior to an orgasm in isolation?
If learning is based on happiness rather than raw reduction in error, then governors will learn to vote for things that have caused past happiness.
And if happiness is a function of total error, not just correction in the error they care about, governors will sometimes vote for things that increase the total error just before their own error is corrected.
The point is, if happiness is a function of total error, governors will actually prefer to reduce their errors in a state of greater disequilibrium. This doesn’t decrease their error any more than in a state of general calm, but it does lead to more happiness, greater learning, and so they learn to perform that action more often. And in some cases they will actually vote to increase the errors of other governors, when they can get the votes.
The horny governor only cares about you having an orgasm. But since it learns from happiness, not from the raw correction in its error, it has learned to vote for you to become afraid and embarrassed just before the moment of climax, because that increases your total error, which increases happiness. And since the horny governor has the votes, it overrules the governors who would vote against those things.
We don’t know how to quantify any of the factors involved, so we can’t test precise models. There are probably constants in these equations, but we can’t figure those out either, at least not yet.
But we can still make reasonable tests of general classes of models. We can make very decent guesses about whether or not something is a function of something else, and we can probably figure out if these relationships are sums or products, whether relationships are linear or exponential, and so on. For example:
happiness = delta_error
This is the original model we proposed, and it’s the most simple. In this case, happiness is caused when an organism corrects any error, and the amount of happiness produced is a direct function of how big of an error was corrected. Eating a cheeseburger makes you happy because, assuming you are hungry, it corrects that error signal. The cheeseburger error.
Not shown in that equation is the kind of relationship. Maybe it’s linear, but maybe it’s exponential. Does eating two cheeseburgers cause more than twice as much happiness as eating one?
This very simple model has the virtue of being very simple. And it seems like it lines up with the basic facts — eating, sleeping, drinking, and fucking do tend to make us happy, especially if we are quite hungry, tired, thirsty, or horny.
But we should also think about more complex models and see if any of them are any better. For example:
happiness = delta_error * product_errors
In this case, the correction in an error is multiplied not by the sum, but by the product of all other errors. So eating a cheeseburger while tired and lonely will be much more pleasurable than eating a cheeseburger while merely tired or merely lonely.
This seems pretty unlikely just from first glance. If happiness were dependent on the product of your other errors, that seems like it would be pretty noticeable, because the difference between correcting an error while largely satisfied and largely unsatisfied would be huge and thus obvious. But this is also something that you could test empirically and maybe there could be some kind of truth to it.
Is this a better model? Not entirely clear, but it certainly makes predictions that can be compared to parts of life we’re familiar with, and it can be tested empirically. That’s a pretty good start.
Or another example:
happiness = delta_error / sum_errors
Instead of multiplying the correction to produce happiness, this time we tried dividing it. In this case, happiness is smaller when the total amount of error is bigger. So correcting the same error leads to less happiness if you’re more out of alignment.
This one seems right out. The joy we get from a cup of hot chocolate is greater when we are lonely, not less. Living in extremis seems like it should only magnify the satisfaction of our experiences. It’s possible that this doesn’t stand up to closer inspection, but people certainly find the idea intuitive:
Another model of happiness is that happiness is proportional to the TD error in the equation above, or the equivalent in whatever system our brain really uses. The TD error is the difference between the current and projected outcome of the action and the expected outcome of the action. So in this model, we get happiness when something corrects an error by more than the governor expects.
Having an especially great sandwich for the first time feels great. This is because you didn’t know how good it would be. But having the same sandwich for the 100th time isn’t as good, even if it corrects the same amount of error. This is because you anticipated it would be that good, so there’s no TD error. In fact, if the sandwich hits the spot less than usual, you’ll be disappointed, even if it’s still pretty good.
In this model, you’d expect that doing the same enjoyable stuff over and over wouldn’t keep you happy for very long. You’d have to mix it up and try new things that correct your errors.
This model does seem to capture something important. But that said, in real life correcting a big enough error usually creates some happiness. So happiness doesn’t seem like it could be entirely based on how unexpected the correction is. Some amount of happiness seems to come from any correction. But it does seem like more unexpected corrections usually make us more happy.
So this is an example of how we can test general models, even before we can make precise measurements. We can think about classes of models, bring them to their limits, ask how the implications of these models compare to other things we already know about life and happiness, things we experience every day.
Just thinking of these questions mechanically, thinking of them as models, prompts us to ask questions like — What is the minimum amount of happiness? Can happiness only go down to zero, or can there be negative happiness? Is there a maximum amount of happiness? Even if a maximum wasn’t designed intentionally, surely there is some kind of limit to the value the hardware can represent? Can you get happiness overflow errors? What is the quantum of happiness? What are the units? — questions that psychologists wouldn’t normally ask.
Since behavioral feedback of any significance is always negative, it follows that there will always be a tendency to move toward a zero-error condition calling for no effort, and (if clever enough) one will always be able to discover the reference condition. By the same token, one will always be able to discover what the subject is controlling, for if disturbances are applied that do not in fact disturb the controlled aspect of the environment, the subject’s behavior will not oppose the disturbance. Only when one has found the correct definition will the proposed controlled quantity be protected against disturbance by the subject’s actions.
— William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception
What we wrote in the previous parts is only a start. Here are the things we need to figure out next.
First, we should try to discover all the basic drives of human psychology. We should learn about their error signals, which we identify as emotions.
When possible, we should also figure out what signal each governor is actually controlling, and the target it is controlling that signal towards. It’s a good start to know that there is a drive with an error we know as thirst, but it would be better to confirm that thirst is the error of a governor controlling blood osmolality. And it would be even better to then confirm that this governor controls blood osmolality towards a target of 280-295 mOsm/kg (or perhaps some biological proxy of that target).
For example, we may find that there is a hunger governor controlling the hormone leptin, a tiredness governor controlling the hormone melatonin, and so on. The answers we find probably won’t be quite that simple, but we’re looking for something along these lines.
We should also try to characterize signals like happiness and curiosity, which don’t seem to be errors from a control system (if nothing else, they aren’t actively driven towards zero!), but do seem to be important signals that interact with the other drives and with motivation in other ways.
Second, we should try to discover the parameters that tune the governors. It’s clear that some governors can be “stronger” than others, and that these patterns of strength and weakness differ between different people. People are more or less brave, more or less neat and clean, etc. We’d like to find out what it means, in a precise sense, for one governor to be stronger than another.
We’d like to know whether parameters are individual to each governor, or global to all of them, or if there are some of both. For example, we’d like to know if each governor has an individual parameter that adjusts how it balances exploration vs. exploitation, or if there is an explore/exploit parameter that influences all the governors globally.
One of our long-term goals is to find ways of measuring these parameters for each person. For example, we might want to ask if someone’s fear governor is stronger than their thirst governor, perhaps even how much stronger. This will give us the start of a true measure of personality.
Third, we will want to discover the laws of what’s known as selection, the detailed parliamentary procedure and rules that control how the governors vote on actions.
As before, there will be parameters that adjust these laws, and make people different from one another. Learning how to measure these parameters will give us an even stronger theory of personality.
Fourth, as we develop a better understanding of the drives, the governors, and the laws that dictate their behavior, we can start working to characterize well-known behaviors in terms of these governors and their parameters.
Here are some things we might be able to understand in terms of this new paradigm: personality, anxiety, depression, personality disorders, possibly other psychiatric disorders, self-harm, high-risk behavior, drugs, and addiction.
If cybernetic principles lead to models that have natural outcomes that look just like anxiety, depression, addiction, etc., that will establish the promise of this approach. Then we can look at the points where the models fail, consider alternative models, refine the approach, and make the models even better.
But this last project is kind of “for the rest of time”. If building the paradigm is successful, people can spend the next few hundred years applying it. But first we have to build it.
1. Considerations
First, a few considerations, issues that might come up when trying to discover the drives.
1.1 Are Emotions Constructed?
One of the questions academics keep asking about emotions is whether or not they are “culturally constructed”.
This may seem like a weird question, but to people on the inside of academic psychology, it’s a major topic.
But we’re not here to revisit those debates, we’re here to put them to rest. The cybernetic perspective gives a very clear answer to the question of whether or not emotions are constructed: yes, and no.
All emotions are biologically hard-wired, because they are the error signals from our most fundamental drives, all of which are necessary for survival. These are not at all constructed. While we don’t yet know the details, we understand that at some level they are physically distinct from each other, controlling different biological signals towards different set points.
But emotion categories are culturally constructed. There are a huge number — dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands — of individual emotions, but we don’t have a word for each of them. Instead we group them together in ways that make practical sense for the needs of our culture.
As usual, hunger is a good example. We treat hunger as if it is just one signal, when in fact hunger is easily a dozen different emotions, maybe more. But because these emotions are all addressed by similar actions (stuffing something in your maw) most languages treat them as one thing.
We can unpack our emotion words when we need to — we can talk about craving salt, or talk about specific cravings that come from this drive, like craving pickles. We can say things like, “I’m stuffed but I’m still hungry!” and so on. But the hunger drives are closely intertwined most of the time, so most languages don’t make any serious distinction between them.
Desert mice almost never drink water; they get almost all their water from their food, from eating seeds. So if desert mice developed a language, they would probably come up with a single word that meant both hungry and thirsty. In their experience, hunger and thirst are addressed by one action, eating seeds, and it’s more useful to combine these ideas than to keep them separate.
No group of humans is as extreme as the desert mouse — but still, we do wonder if there are cultures where people get most of their water from their food, and if those cultures would bother to distinguish between hunger and thirst, or if they would have one word covering both.
1.2 Redundancy
Basic needs, especially needs that are critical to our survival, are probably supported by more than just one drive.
Elevators are designed not only to support the weight they were designed to carry, but to support many times that weight, and they have multiple brakes and other failsafes in case of crisis. If one brake or failsafe malfunctions, the others kick in to prevent disaster.
For the same reason, we should expect drives to be redundant, sometimes massively redundant. Humans tend to create systems that are highly efficient but fragile. But nature tends to create systems that are inefficient but resilient. If an animal has only one drive that tells it to eat, then if anything goes wrong with that drive, it will die. Better to have multiple drives, so that the animal is able to survive even if it is born with a surprise mutation or gets an unexpected brain injury.
The more important a need is to survival, the more likely it is that there will be built-in redundancy. A need that is critically important may be supported by not one governor but by many separate governors that all control different measures of the same need.
2. Observational Methods
One of the most foundational projects is to discover the list of drives and emotions. Above anything else, we should figure out how many different drives there are, and do our best to identify each of them.
We can do this in two ways. We can use methods that are observational (looking at historical data, case studies, etc.) and methods that are empirical (let’s collect some data). Let’s look at these methods one at a time, starting with observational methods.
2.1 Pure Observation
We can draw a lot of reasonable conclusions about the list of drives based on our everyday experiences of what it’s like to be human, and what we know about what it takes to survive.
For example, we know that people have drives that lead to hunger and pain because we all experience those emotions, and it’s clear that they motivate our behavior. Most behaviors you encounter can be explained in terms of a basic drive.
Drives aren’t linked directly to each specific behavior, of course. There isn’t a drive to watch operas, or to play shuffleboard. For one thing, those options didn’t exist for our ancestors. People are probably driven to do these things because of some kind of general social emotions. But any behavior that can’t be explained in terms of a known basic drive may point to a basic drive of its own.
For example, it seems possible that humans have a basic drive to look at animals. As strange as this might sound, we go to great lengths to look at animals, even in private when no one else is around, even when no one is watching, and it seems like we are driven to this for no other reason than to look at them. It’s hard to explain these behaviors in terms of another drive, so the drive to look at animals may itself be basic.
Think about all the time, space, and money we spend on zoos. Think of how we plaster the walls of our kindergartens with pictures of lions. Think of how many hours you personally have spent watching nature documentaries, or animal videos on YouTube.
Before dog people got online, everyone knew that cat pictures ruled the internet. Animal pictures still rule the internet. As of this writing, the subreddit r/aww (mostly pictures of animals) is the 6th largest subreddit, with 37 million members. This may also be why people get pets in the first place, so they have animals to look at whenever they want.
If the desire to look at animals is a drive, then it should be homeostatic and conserved; you should want to go to the zoo for a while, then you should be ready to go home. If we keep you from going to the zoo, you will look at geese in the park instead. And if we keep you from looking at any animals at all, you may eventually become nearly frantic with your desire to do so, especially if this drive is unusually strong in you.
Games like 2048 and Candy Crush suggest that there might be some kind of drive that causes sorting behavior, though maybe this is just an unusual manifestation of a drive for decorating or cleaning your environment.
Like, let’s draw out how weird it is that people play these games. What the fuck is going on? Why is it so engrossing to watch two little blocks labeled “2” combine to form a block labeled “4”? People will do this for hours. It sounds so dumb, and yet when you’re on a plane sitting behind someone playing this on their seatback screen, you can’t look away.
When we find something extremely engrossing, it might be because it has concentrated the exact thing our drive is trying to control. If the drive here is something like “sorting”, there aren’t many naturally-occurring situations where you’re only sorting. But a game can provide you with pure, unadulterated sorting. (Compare: superstimuli.)
Another unlikely drive is some kind of drive to dig holes. The strongest evidence for this is in hobby tunneling, where people wake up one day and start digging vast networks of tunnels, usually for no apparent reason. They often do their digging in secret, and they’ll keep doing it even if there is a social or material cost, even when it’s forbidden. This suggests that it’s not done for social reasons, but in fact is done in spite of them.
What else could explain the incredible popularity of Minecraft? Why would children flock to a game about digging, instead of a game about anything else? As they say, the children yearn for the mines.
When it is hard for us to do an activity itself, watching the activity can sometimes serve as an acceptable substitute. In this way, a drive for excavation might explain what the Italians call umarell. You’ve probably seen them — old men who spend their days watching construction sites, especially dig sites, standing there entranced with their hands clasped behind their back. This is enough of a universal across time and space that Jerry Seinfeld even has a bit about it.
Of course, these Italian men are so old-fashioned. Today the boys get all their construction watching on TikTok:
There may even be a drive to seek out weapons, expressed especially strongly in boys. If you have ever been a boy, or spent any time around boys, this will probably sound familiar. Check out this passage from the Cyropaedia, a 370 BC biography of Cyrus the Great:
And to-day a battle is before us where no man need teach us how to fight: we have the trick of it by nature, as a bull knows how to use his horns, or a horse his hoofs, or a dog his teeth, or a wild boar his tusks. The animals know well enough,” he added, “when and where to guard themselves: they need no master to tell them that. I myself, when I was a little lad, I knew by instinct how to shield myself from the blow I saw descending: if I had nothing else, I had my two fists, and used them with all my force against my foe: no one taught me how to do it, on the contrary they beat me if they saw me clench my fists. And a knife, I remember, I never could resist: I clutched the thing whenever I caught sight of it: not a soul showed me how to hold it, only nature herself, I do aver. I did it, not because I was taught to do it, but in spite of being forbidden, like many another thing to which nature drove me, in spite of my father and mother both. Yes, and I was never tired of hacking and hewing with my knife whenever I got the chance: it did not seem merely natural, like walking or running, it was positive joy.
Consider this collection, and what could possibly have driven someone to put it together with such care:
People seem stuck on the idea that complex behaviors like digging or pretending a cool stick is a weapon couldn’t possibly be innate. But obviously they can be. Breeds of dogs whose ancestors were bred to herd animals, will herd animals without having to be taught. Spiders spin webs. People usually become attracted to adult members of the same species, rather than becoming attracted to furniture or the moon. If evolution has enough discretion to latch our sexual drives onto reasonable targets most of the time, then surely it can latch other drives onto other complex targets, like a stick that reminds you of an AK-47.
While we can see evidence of these drives as they express themselves in specific kinds of behavior, we don’t immediately know what is actually being controlled. A drive to dig might be implemented as something like a drive to smell freshly-turned earth, because in general that target would lead to digging behavior. You could imagine how tangential behaviors, like gardening, might be other, confused results of this drive.
2.2 Ecological
We can also draw some reasonable conclusions from our understanding of biology.
All of our psychological drives were put into us by evolution to help keep us alive. So generally speaking, we should find in ourselves at least one drive (and matching emotion) for each thing that we need to stay alive, and at least one drive for all the things that have been necessary to be evolutionarily successful.
You need to eat to stay alive, which is another reason to expect at least one drive for hunger. You don’t need sex to stay alive, but the species does need a sex drive to go on being a species at all, which is why evolution made us horny. Things that are necessary for survival (like breathing and sleeping) must be backed up by drives.
However, there are a few drives that are conspicuously missing — we don’t have quite every drive we need. See the example of scurvy, the horrible disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. You might think that people suffering from scurvy would seek out foods that contain the thing they lack, but as far as we know they don’t crave lemons or cabbage, which is why the cure took so long to discover. Vitamin C is necessary for survival, but people don’t appear to have a drive to seek it out.
There seem to be two main reasons we lack this drive.
First, most foods contain at least a little vitamin C, so most of our ancestors would have survived just fine without a drive telling them to seek it out. If you eat any kind of normal diet, you’ll end up with plenty of vitamin C by default. Only in very weird situations where you get no fresh food at all, like being a 15th century mariner or an arctic explorer, does this become a problem.
Second, this is a specific case where humans happen to be very unusual. We are one of the very small number of animals that can’t synthesize our own vitamin C, which is why we need to find it in our food. Most animals don’t need to consume any vitamin C, they make their own, so most animals would have no need for vitamin C drive at all.
We probably inherit most of our drives from designs that are common to all mammals, and since the default mammal package doesn’t include a drive for vitamin C (because most mammals make their own), humans would have had to evolve such a drive from scratch. But given that vitamin C is so abundant in everything we normally eat, it’s easy to imagine why we didn’t bother.
We have a vegetarian friend who used to struggle with random fatigue and low energy. Then he tried taking vitamin B12, and immediately felt a huge difference. But he didn’t seem to crave foods high in B12 before, suggesting that vitamin B12 also lacks a governor, despite being an essential nutrient.
This may be a common feature of many vitamins — in fact, it may be part of what it means for us to call something “a vitamin”. Most vitamins were discovered by people trying to cure diseases of deficiency, where people weren’t getting enough of the vitamin. It’s hard to develop a deficiency of something you have a drive for — the deficiency and the cure will be really obvious, since you’ll develop cravings. If you have a drive for some substance, it will be hard to develop a deficiency, so it may not be classified as a vitamin.
Some essential minerals probably have governors, but others may not, and it’s not entirely clear which is which.
But there will be signs. If you have a drive for a mineral, it should be pretty hard to develop a deficiency in that mineral, since you will normally be driven to consume it. But if you don’t have a drive for a mineral, then just like with vitamins, you’re at risk of developing deficiencies in that mineral, since you don’t have any natural motivation to seek it out. If there’s a mineral that people are always getting deficient in, that’s probably a sign that it doesn’t have a drive.
Iodine is a necessary mineral — if you don’t get enough, you develop terrible diseases of deficiency, especially goiter. This happens pretty frequently, or at least it did until people discovered the connection and started supplementing salt with iodine. Again this seems like possible evidence that there’s no iodine drive and no iodine governor. If there were, then all these Swiss people suffering from goiter would have been sitting around in their mountain cabins going “damn I would kill for some seafood right now” (seafood is high in iodine). On the other hand, maybe they were saying that, and history simply didn’t record it.
This seems like the kind of thing we should already have a clear answer for, but the literature on iodine is pretty unclear — there are a few studies, like this one that says that children aged 8-10 can’t tell the difference between traditionally prepared pickles made with iodized salt and traditionally prepared pickles made with non-iodized salt. Most of the existing research agrees, though there isn’t much of it.
But we’ve collected a bit of data on this already, and found that while most people indeed seem unable to distinguish between iodized and non-iodized salt, a few people can pick them out of a lineup at rates somewhat better than chance. It’s also possible that most people can’t distinguish between iodized and non-iodized salt because most people aren’t iodine deficient, so that drive is inactive.
Another slightly odd possibility is that maybe some people have iodine governors and other people don’t. Maybe this depends on where your ancestors lived, and whether they naturally got iodine in their diet (like if they were fisherpeople) or whether they had to actively seek it out to get enough (#hillpeople).
We are probably “missing” some other governors, especially governors for things that are not necessary to stay alive per se, but things that would be nice to have.
For example, there appears to be no emotion that drives us to go and get more sunshine. Lack of sunshine is pretty bad for you, but there’s just no system making sure you go out and get it. Just like vitamin C, our ancestors were exposed to so much sunlight that evolution never bothered to give us a sunlight drive.
This is why you have to use your human intellect, or a phone reminder or something, to remember to get your daily sunlight. You have a hard time building an association between sunlight and health because you don’t have a dedicated system keeping tabs on it.
2.3 Resistance
Another way to identify the drives is to ask ourselves what kinds of things make people angry when you try to stop them from doing those things.
This provides some justification for drives like privacy and territoriality. Most people will go nuts if they’re not allowed some amount of personal territory; think of the teenager with the STAY OUT sign on their door.
This is also the reason to believe in various social emotions, like an emotion that arises when we feel we are being taken advantage of. This governor has a target that’s something like “I am doing 1/x of the work in this group, where x is the number of people in this group”. If you are doing more than your fair share of the work, very far from this target, then you get an error signal that feels something like being exploited, or being played.
This is why roommate situations are so stressful. People have different setpoints for cleanliness, and you might expect that each person would just clean the apartment up to their preferred level. An animal that had no social emotions would probably do exactly that. But people are social animals, and for people living in groups, the desire for cleanliness is in conflict with the desire not to get taken advantage of.
We can also take the argument from depression in reverse. When someone is in the depths of a serious depression, we think that’s a result of all of their drives being turned way down. What do people conspicuously stop doing when they are depressed? The answer is hygiene. They let both their body and their living space become unkempt, even filthy.
If you try to stop someone from getting/doing something, and they resist, that’s a drive. This is useful when, like privacy, it may not appear that they’re actively doing anything. But a drive for privacy becomes apparent when you don’t let people have it, because then they will fight for it.
2.4 Knockout
Sometimes a drive is conspicuously absent in a few individuals, throwing into stark relief the fact that it’s present in everyone else. This can give us a surprisingly clear picture of the missing drive — the shape of something can be more obvious from its absence than its presence (or at least you can learn different things about its shape from the absence).
Cases of total or near-total knockout, where a person or animal is entirely missing a drive or an emotion, provide pretty strong evidence that the drive is present in everyone else. Consider the patient known as SM-046, a woman with severe amygdala damage, who experiences almost no fear:
While the researchers behind this study don’t seem to understand its significance, we see this as strong evidence that fear and suffocation are separate emotions arising from separate drives.
SM has a complete fear knockout, and never experiences fear, no matter how dangerous the situation. She just doesn’t have that governor, or her copy of the governor is totally turned off. But she will still feel “air hunger” when she is suffocating, because breathing is handled by a different governor. It produces an entirely different error signal, one that’s easy to mistake for fear if you’re not looking carefully.
Fear is pretty important to survival, so it seems like one of those cases where you might expect evolution to have added some redundancy. It seems reasonable to have different fear governors for different things, so if you knock your head wrong once and are no longer afraid of snakes, at least you’re still afraid of tigers. But SM doesn’t seem to have any backup fears that are still online.
This suggests two possibilities. 1) Maybe there is really only one governor that accounts for every kind of fear. SM isn’t just missing some kinds of fear, she’s missing every kind, because there’s a single point of failure. 2) There are multiple fear governors, but they are organized in a way where it’s possible to knock all of them out at once. For example, maybe there are multiple governors but her ability to generate the perception of danger is knocked out, so all the governors are totally inactive.
There are also some very rare genetic conditions that leave people with no experience of physical pain. These conditions are very rare because pain is very important. Without pain, you usually die, because you have no motivation not to put your arm in a wood chipper. One patient said, “at a young age, I would like to bang my head against the wall because I liked the feeling of vibration”.
This suggests that like fear, pain might be a single emotion, because it can be so cleanly toggled on or off. As far as we know, there aren’t genetic conditions where you can feel burning but you can’t feel cutting, or vice versa. People seem to either have pain basically working or have it basically gone, across the board.
That said, there do appear to be shades of pain insensitivity. For example, Jo Cameron has a version of pain insensitivity where she still experiences pain in the sense that she can avoid harming herself, but her subjective experience of pain isn’t at all unpleasant. She can tell that she’s been burned or cut, but she doesn’t mind. She described childbirth as “a tickle”, and said, “I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn’t hurt me.”
While Jo’s case is extreme, this kind of variation seems common. Some people experience pain but don’t mind, and other people don’t notice at all, and also there are shades between. So maybe there are tightly-linked drives or subcomponents that can eventually be distinguished with enough examination.
Extreme personality disorders may also be a kind of knockout. The average psychopath behaves a lot like a person with weights near zero on certain social governors, the governors that normally make people feel emotions like empathy and shame.
Compare the stories of patient SM and Jo Cameron to this podcast interview with the sociopath M.E. Thomas / “Jamie”. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but we want to highlight this one section where Spencer, the interviewer, asks her about fear:
SPENCER: I know a handful of sociopaths, and one thing I’ve asked them about is fear. Some of them say that they don’t think they have fear, or at least not in the normal way that other people do. What’s your relationship with fear?
JAMIE: Yeah, I totally agree with that. … Sometimes that’s gotten me in trouble because I will not take adequate precautions. Sometimes I do things that can maybe seem like I’m a little accident-prone. For instance, when I go mountain biking, I probably crash like 20% of the time, which I’ve heard is high.
SPENCER: Yeah, you mention in your book how you cut yourself in the kitchen a lot with knives by accident. Can you talk about that?
JAMIE: Yes, I still have a plastic safety knife. It’s kind of like the type that you carve pumpkins with, or little children can carve pumpkins with. I almost always use that knife. Here and there, I think it actually is safer for me to just use a bigger metal knife, but then I have to be very, very conscientious. I’m the same way too with train tracks. There are some train tracks close to where I live, and I cross them basically every day, but I know that I’m bad at paying attention and being careful for my own self. So I really talk to myself when I’m doing it, I’m like, “Here we come, 15 feet from the train tracks, 10 feet from the train tracks. Look right, left, right, left, right.” It’s this very belt and suspenders approach to kind of rein in my brain, which naturally doesn’t care, doesn’t even pay attention to things like that.
Sometimes psychopaths like to say that they are more rational than other people, like in this excerpt:
JAMIE: I think you can always cooperate with psychopaths when your incentives align, and when you’re able to convince a psychopath that the incentives do align, then the psychopath is a very good team member.
SPENCER: And why are they a good team member?
JAMIE: Because once their incentives are aligned that way, they’re almost like a robot. They will always behave in a way that is in alignment with their incentives. Essentially, you can trust — in economics, they talk about the rational actor, who always behaves rationally — in a lot of ways, the psychopath, as long as they’re not experiencing gray rage or maybe some weird hormones or a situation like that, they basically are the economic rational actor.
But assuming self-preservation is one of your values, what is so rational about crashing 20% of the time you go mountain biking?
A different interpretation is that psychopaths aren’t more rational, but they are less conflicted. What they describe as a lack of ego is perhaps a lack of the self-suppressing social emotions that include certain types of fear of social consequences (for example, shame).
In a normal person, these prosocial emotions are in conflict with selfish desires that might lead someone to cheat, lie, steal, and so on. But psychopaths mostly lack these emotions, they are entirely un-self-conscious. This means that they feel little hesitation to bend the rules. But it also has the relaxing side effect of leading to less inner conflict, which might make one feel very rational. After all, the experience is of having clear desires and working towards them without any second thoughts.
This might also be why psychopaths are often so charming and charismatic — we find a lack of inner conflict very attractive, the lack of tension even showing in your face.
3. Empirical Methods
So far we’ve looked at observational techniques only. Now we’re gonna get off our asses and (describe how to) collect some data. Here’s how we might do it.
3.1 Artificial Knockout
Natural knockouts are the clearest-cut examples, and teach us the strongest lessons. But we can learn similar lessons by knocking out emotions artificially, like with drugs.
Drugs don’t usually seem to reduce the weight on a governor to zero. But they do often seem to turn the weight (or error) on a drive down, and sometimes they seem to turn it up. For example, alcohol seems like it temporarily reduces the weights on the fear and the shame governors, making people less driven by fear and shame. In contrast, it doesn’t seem to have much impact on the hunger governor. Drunk people seem just as hungry as normal. Or maybe alcohol turns hunger up; it seems like everyone wants fried food after a couple of pints, but maybe this is driven more by the sudden lack of shame.
Sometimes the changes caused by drugs are what we would normally think of as “side effects”, but all effects are really just effects. When we talk about SSRIs having sexual side effects, this may cash out as them interfering in some way with the horny governor.
There are some extreme circumstances that are almost like knockouts, and may help us distinguish between emotions in similar ways. Our favorite example, of course, is the potato diet. When people eat almost nothing but potatoes for several days, some of them find that the normal sensation of hunger becomes very weird. They say things like:
“It’s been very easy for me to not eat enough doing this and not realize that’s why I feel off. Might be worth a PSA. Hunger literally feels different on this diet.”
“finding myself completely forgetting about food, even as something i need to do to live. not experiencing any hunger. no urge to snack. i am certain i’m not drinking enough water. i definitely have more energy, and more focus, despite this … not sure if i’m actually hungry but haven’t eaten nearly enough.”
“I did get more tired throughout, and my appetite actually continually decreased. Had to remind myself to eat quite often and actually made a schedule.”
“On 100% potatoes, I don’t ever feel ‘hungry’ the way hunger usually feels, I’ll notice that I’m low-energy or fading, and that’s my signal that I should eat again”
“the normal feeling of hunger was entirely gone for me – what was left was a feeling of being almost faint and feeling not great when I went too long without eating. Took a lot of adjusting to.”
We think that “hunger” is actually a number of different emotions that come from several different drives. Because eating a well-rounded meal satisfies most of these drives at the same time, we don’t normally experience these emotions independently from one another, which is why we call them by a single name.
We interpret the comments from the potato diet as reflecting a situation where some hunger emotions are unbundled from others, creating unusual subjective experiences.
We think it went something like this: let’s say there’s one hunger drive for calories and then a bunch of drives for micronutrients like magnesium, sugar, or whatever. Normally the metabolism governor drives most eating behavior, since that’s the strongest signal. The other signals rise and fall with the signal from the calories governor anyway, because if you’re getting enough calories from a mixed diet, you will be getting approximately the right amount of the other things you need. They only chime in if you happen to be getting a diet really low in magnesium or whatever.
But something about the potato diet convinces your body that its weight set point should be lower, so it starts removing calories from your fat stores instead of adding them. This makes the metabolism governor stay quiet. It doesn’t have to vote for you to eat to get calories anymore, they are being added directly to the bloodstream.
But your micronutrient governors don’t have the same kinds of reserves, so they keep sending out their error signals as normal. But you’re not used to responding to these micronutrient errors in isolation, and they’re not used to running the show. You feel vaguely weird and bad, but it’s not something you’re used to thinking of as hunger, and you don’t immediately know what to do about it. That’s why it feels weird on the potato diet.
Or here’s a slightly different model: If there are hunger governors for five different things and your diet only provides the nutrients that satisfy four of them, you’ll seem to experience hunger normally: very hungry before meals, full after meals (because of a fullness governor switching on). But there’s one governor that continues to vote for eating, who is later joined by the other four as time passes. So if switching to the potato diet suddenly satisfies all the hunger governors, you might experience the complete satisfaction of your hunger governors for the first time.
Which drives and emotions have been unbundled, and why exactly that would happen on potatoes, remains an open question.
3.2 Behavioral Exhaustion
You can discover the root of a drive by separating the target of that drive into its component parts, and feeding each one into the system in turn.
Let’s say you’re craving a cranberry juice cocktail. A natural question might be to wonder why you crave it so bad. Any craving presumably comes from one or more of your drives, but which one(s)?
A reasonable guess is that you don’t crave the whole cranberry juice cocktail, you actually crave one or more of its ingredients. You can test this by consuming the ingredients one at a time. If you first let yourself drink as much water as you want, and you still crave the cranberry juice cocktail, clearly you did not want it just because you were thirsty per se.
So you look at the other ingredients. There’s lots of sugar in the cocktail, maybe you are craving something sweet. So next you eat as much sugar as you want. If you’re still craving the cranberry juice cocktail, then it must have been something else.
In principle you can follow this process as far as you want, to discover precisely the ingredient you were craving. And once you discover the ingredient, you can follow the same process even further. You can go as far as centrifuging the original cranberry juice and eating different strata to determine exactly what part of it you were after. With enough effort, you might be able to identify the exact molecule.
In practice, things probably won’t be so simple. From oral rehydration formula, we know that some combinations of sugar, salt, and water are much more hydrating than others. If you mix the wrong combination, it can even become dehydrating. So in some cases, cravings may be holistic, your drives may really vote for something that is greater than the sum of its parts. This may be why some foods, like beans and rice, are often eaten together and seem much more delicious than the sum of their parts. In our pursuit of a better understanding of psychology, we can’t forget about biology. There is probably a reason why people prefer to drink lemonade instead of consuming water, sugar, and lemon juice in isolation. And by golly, we’re gonna find it.
In general, exhaustion shows that 1) there is a drive for the pure thing being exhausted (or else why would the organism keep taking/doing it), and 2) any behavior remaining after exhaustion cannot be caused in this case by the exhausted drive, though the exhausted drive might also vote for that behavior if it were not exhausted.
3.3 Fungibility
Another angle is looking at impulses for different actions and trying to determine how they are fungible.
The thermostat only cares about the temperature in the house. When the house is too cold, actions that raise the temperature in any way are all equally successful, since they all correct the thermostat’s error. So from the thermostat’s perspective, actions that raise the house temperature are totally fungible. It is just as happy to turn on the baseboard heating as it is to turn on the forced-air heating, in this absurd hypothetical where your house, for some reason, has both.
We can use other fungible actions in the same way, and trace them back to their common origin. For example, you may notice that you feel hungry. You want bananas. You interrogate that feeling — what else sounds good? The other things that come to mind are avocados, potatoes, and spinach. All of them sound great.
In many ways these foods are very different — for example, the avocado is high in fat and the banana is not. But you realize that all of the foods that sound good have something in common: they are all high in potassium. So instead of eating any of these foods, you drink some straight potassium chloride in water.
You may find that you no longer feel hungry at all, suggesting that what you thought of as a general sense of hunger was in fact a single drive for potassium. Your potassium governor was happy to fulfill in a number of different ways, so it was willing to vote for bananas, avocado, spinach, anything that would reduce its error. And when you drank straight potassium chloride in water, that also satisfied the drive, so the error signal went away. We don’t know if this would happen, but if it did, that would be fairly strong evidence for a potassium drive.
Similarly, you might notice you have a craving for eggs and broccoli. Then you eat some nutritional yeast, which is basically nothing but B vitamins. Five minutes later, you don’t crave those foods anymore. Same deal.
3.4 Prevention
A version of fungibility in reverse, or an empirical version of resistance. To see what drive is behind a behavior, keep the person (or animal) from doing the behavior and see what they do instead. If an organism tries to do something, stop it. What does it do instead? This is probably an expression of the same drive.
If you do this enough, you can triangulate all these behaviors and infer what variable the drive is controlling. You might also learn that two behaviors you thought were different are both expressions of the same drive.
Also interesting that at some point the organism might do a substitution, e.g. look at pictures of food if it can’t manage to eat. When they can’t substitute, you have the drive surrounded.
3.5 Effort
A similar method is to see what goals an animal will expend large amounts of effort to reach. A rat will push a lever 1000 times for water if that’s its only way to get hydration. It wouldn’t do this if the desire for water were an epiphenomenon of some other drive. The rat really wants water, specifically wants water, and will accept no substitutes. The fact that it puts in so much effort is the evidence.
3.6 Division
To alchemists, Fire was considered “the true and Universal Analyzer of all Mixt Bodies”, capable of dividing any substance into its more base components.
But there were some problems with this approach. The alchemists were shaken when they discovered that Fire was not the only thing that could divide a substance into simpler components. They found that liquids like urine, beer, and wine would separate when put out in extreme cold.
Worse, there were some elements that fire couldn’t separate at all. Robert Boyle relates a story of gold being kept in a furnace for two months straight. The gold stayed a liquid the whole time, but it never separated into baser substances. Apparently fire had failed to separate gold into its elementary ingredients. Some true and Universal Analyzer! Or, more radically, maybe this meant that gold didn’t have more basic components, that gold itself was an element.
Observations like these threw alchemy into a state of chaos. In the preface to his Elements of Chemistry, where he pitches his homies on a new way of doing things, Antoine Lavoisier explains this history. He apologizes for not including a list of all the elements, saying (emphasis ours):
It will, no doubt, be a matter of surprise, that in a treatise upon the elements of chemistry, there should be no chapter on the constituent and elementary parts of matter; but I shall take occasion, in this place, to remark, that the fondness for reducing all the bodies in nature to three or four elements, proceeds from a prejudice which has descended to us from the Greek Philosophers. The notion of four elements, which, by the variety of their proportions, compose all the known substances in nature, is a mere hypothesis, assumed long before the first principles of experimental philosophy or of chemistry had any existence. In those days, without possessing facts, they framed systems; while we, who have collected facts, seem determined to reject them, when they do not agree with our prejudices. The authority of these fathers of human philosophy still carry great weight, and there is reason to fear that it will even bear hard upon generations yet to come.
It is very remarkable, that, notwithstanding of the number of philosophical chemists who have supported the doctrine of the four elements, there is not one who has not been led by the evidence of facts to admit a greater number of elements into their theory. The first chemists that wrote after the revival of letters, considered sulphur and salt as elementary substances entering into the composition of a great number of substances; hence, instead of four, they admitted the existence of six elements. Beccher assumes the existence of three kinds of earth, from the combination of which, in different proportions, he supposed all the varieties of metallic substances to be produced. Stahl gave a new modification to this system; and succeeding chemists have taken the liberty to make or to imagine changes and additions of a similar nature. All these chemists were carried along by the influence of the genius of the age in which they lived, which contented itself with assertions without proofs; or, at least, often admitted as proofs the slighted degrees of probability, unsupported by that strictly rigorous analysis required by modern philosophy.
Lavosier doesn’t claim that he knows what is an element and what is not. He says that we are going to need some very serious analysis before any of us can be sure. So instead of starting with a list of the elements, Lavoisier proposes a new method for figuring them out:
If, by the term elements, we mean to express those simple and indivisible atoms of which matter is composed, it is extremely probable we know nothing at all about them; but, if we apply the term elements, or principles of bodies, to express our idea of the last point which analysis is capable of reaching, we must admit, as elements, all the substances into which we are capable, by any means, to reduce bodies by decomposition. Not that we are entitled to affirm, that these substances we consider as simple may not be compounded of two, or even of a greater number of principles; but, since these principles cannot be separated, or rather since we have not hitherto discovered the means of separating them, they act with regard to us as simple substances, and we ought never to suppose them compounded until experiment and observation has proved them to be so.
To put this in more modern language: What we mean by “element” is “something that can’t be divided”. If we’ve discovered a way to divide some substance into different components, that substance can’t be an element. Elements are by definition the basic building blocks of matter that cannot be divided — so if it can be divided in any way, it’s not an element. (Ignore atomic chemistry for the moment, they wouldn’t discover that for a hundred years.)
Substances that we can’t divide are candidates. They might be elements — after all, they seem entirely indivisible so far. But some day we might discover a way to divide them into different components, which would prove they’re not elements after all. So they’re not elements for sure, only candidates.
If you put wood into a fire, it will be divided into ashes, smoke, etc. This makes it pretty clear that wood isn’t an element. But as of 1789, no one has found a way to divide gold into anything else, and it’s not for lack of trying. So gold should be considered an element, at least for now. To Lavoisier, gold is provisionally an element. Other things can be divided in a way that yields gold, but he’s never been able to confirm a way to divide gold into anything simpler.
In short, it’s impossible to prove that something is an element, but you can prove that something is not, simply by dividing it. Anything we know how to divide is proven to be a compound, not an element. But anything we don’t know how to divide is only a possible element, because we may yet discover some way to divide it.
We find ourselves in a similar situation today, and we can use something like Lavoisier’s approach to discover the full set of psychological drives (each with a corresponding emotion and governor), just like the chemists used his approach to discover the full set of elements.
The difference between these methods and the methods from the previous sections is that the methods in the previous sections start with observed behaviors, and try to figure out what drive(s) are behind them. These methods start with established or proposed drive(s) and try to learn more.
A good place to start is hunger. We think that hunger is not one emotion, it’s a common term applied to many emotions. The reason these signals are all mistakenly called by the same name, at least in English, is that they all come from governors that vote for eating behavior. These behaviors all look superficially similar, but in fact we put things in our mouths for a variety of reasons.
Humans come with several different hunger drives because we need to eat several different things to remain healthy. We’ll call these things-you-need-to-eat “nutrients”, though this may be a little different from the common usage of that word.
Most foods contain more than one nutrient, so most foods satisfy more than one governor. A decent burrito will satisfy almost everything — your salt, carbs, fat, and guacamole governors, etc. This makes these emotions hard to disentangle, so most cultures don’t bother. It’s still possible to express these drives — “I’m really craving pickles” or “I would kill for some mozzarella right now” — and there are some related idioms like “sweet tooth”. But we don’t have dedicated words for each individual emotion, we just lump them together as “hunger”.
If you’ve messed around with your diet in really strange ways, as we have, you can sometimes get to the point where the different hunger drives become obvious. When we supplemented potassium, it was very clear to us that this increased our cravings for salt.
Like Lavoisier, we can try to break hunger down into individual drives, until we find drives we can’t distinguish any further. Those drives that can’t be divided are probably basic drives, at least until proven otherwise.
Let’s play through some examples. We think that there is probably at least one drive for salt (likely for sodium, but maybe there is a drive for chloride too) and at least one drive for fatty foods.
Now consider Joey, who wants to eat a pile of onion rings. If this is simply unalloyed hunger, a general desire for calories, then if you give Joey any other food, and he eats that food to exhaustion, he should no longer want to eat the onion rings.
However, if we assume there is one drive for salty foods, and a separate drive for fatty foods, we might suspect that the strong desire for onion rings reflects a combination of these desires, leading him to seek a food that is both salty and fatty. If true, he will also be at least somewhat interested in foods that are salty but not fatty, and in foods that are fatty but not salty.
Then, if we let Joey eat as much as he wants of a food that is salty but not fatty (perhaps mini pretzels), he will still be interested in foods that are fatty but not salty. And if we let him eat as much as he wants of a food that is fatty but not salty (perhaps avocado), he will still be interested in foods that are salty but not fatty. This would demonstrate that these are different drives.
It probably has not escaped your attention that most foods that are salty are also fatty, and vice versa (french fries, olives, peanut butter, etc.). Perhaps this indicates some kind of drive specifically for foods that are both fatty and salty, a drive that cannot be extinguished by salt or fat in isolation. We will probably discover some outcomes at least this weird, and we should try not to stick too closely to any assumptions. The early chemists really didn’t expect to some day discover isotopes.
Evolution is doing her own thing, and she has no obligation to provide categories that make any sense to us. Governors might be controlling anything at all. There might be an important hunger governor that controls a proxy of a proxy of the ratio between sodium and potassium in the bloodstream. That’s not something that a human will find intuitive — but it’s not about being intuitive to the humans! The only law is, whatever works!
But assuming for a moment that our study with Joey did support the idea that there’s both a salt governor and a fat governor, similar techniques could be used to discover whether there’s just one governor controlling fat-hunger, or if there are separate drives for different kinds of fat. Perhaps one drive for saturated and another drive for unsaturated fat. Or perhaps one drive for sterols? The truth will probably be stranger than we expect.
A relatable example of this is the “dessert stomach”. If you can eat a big meal and still have room for dessert, it must be because your sugar or fat governor (or both) is still active. You can exhaust chicken-hunger while not exhausting chocolate-lava-cake hunger. This is clear evidence that there are at least two hunger drives.
3.7 The Parable of Rat C13
A lot of the studies we’ve suggested would be difficult or unethical to run on humans. But it may be easier to run this kind of study with animals.
First of all, we can have more control over an animal’s diet than we usually would over a human’s. And second, humans might try to eat more or less of something to show the researchers how virtuous or how tough they are, but animals won’t have anything to prove — they’ll express their hunger drives with little interference from drives about impressing the research team.
A design might look something like this: Restrict the animal’s food for a while so we know it will be hungry. Then, give it as much butter as it wants and let it eat until it stops eating. This way, we can assume that it should be fully corrected for any nutrient in the butter.
Then, give the animal access to olive oil. If it eats an appreciable amount of olive oil, that suggests there’s a drive for at least one nutrient in olive oil that is not in butter. Further tests should be able to isolate the exact nutrients. You could also try this in the opposite order, to find if there are drives for nutrients in butter that are not found in olive oil.
And in fact, some of these studies have already been run on animals. As one example, consider one 1968 paper by Paul Rozin. In this study, Rozin housed Sprague-Dawley rats in cages that contained water, a salt-vitamin mix, and a “liquid cafeteria” of three foods: 1) sucrose in water, 2) a 30% protein solution, and 3) Mazola oil for fat. All the rats responded well to this cafeteria, growing bigger and showing a lot of stability in their choices of liquids.
Rats clearly had protein targets and were able to hit them without blinking. When offered protein solution diluted by ½ or ¼, they increased how much solution they drank to compensate, so that their protein intake was approximately constant, though they didn’t compensate quite as well for the ¼ solution as they did for the ½ solution. Some rats were better than others at keeping their protein intake constant. This starts looking like an early form of cybernetic personality testing — at least in rats.
Even when Rozin added quinine hydrochloride to the diluted solution, a flavor that rats normally hate, they still compensated and drank more of the diluted protein solution. This suggests they really were controlling protein intake, not just drinking for taste. That said, Rat C13 seemed to like the quinine just fine, and didn’t show any preference for the solution without it. Another sign of personality — that Rat C13, what a character!
In contrast, when Rozin diluted the sucrose solution, their source of carbohydrates, the rats only drank a little more sucrose solution to compensate. Some rats didn’t drink more sucrose solution at all. This is kind of surprising, because under normal circumstances all the rats took at least 50% of their calories from sucrose.
Similarly, when rats were deprived of protein for a few days, they would drink more protein solution to make up for it. But when rats were deprived of sucrose solution for a few days, they would actually drink slightly less sucrose solution when it came back. The effects of being deprived were also noticeably different. Rats lost more than twice as much weight when deprived of protein than when deprived of carbohydrates.
We wish that we could provide similar comparisons for fat, but Rozin says that, “due to the very low levels of fat intake, no meaningful compensation value could be calculated.”
This isn’t evidence that carbohydrates are totally unregulated — they may just be regulated on a timescale that isn’t noticeable over a few days. The author speculates that, “this failure may have occurred because the highly palatable 35% sucrose solution is consumed at levels well above a physiological minimum.” And of course, the regulation may just be too complex to see in Rozin’s data. But it does at least look like evidence that protein is closely controlled, and controlled separately from overall calorie intake, at least in rats.
Score one for Lavoisier’s method. Assuming that these findings are reliable, this seems like clear evidence against the idea that there is just one elemental drive for hunger. It also seems like evidence in favor of a drive for protein. Whether that drive for protein is elemental, or whether it too can be broken down into a collection of more basic drives, perhaps drives for individual amino acids, remains to be seen.
The idea of feeding minerals “free choice” to livestock came about by a need to decrease over-consumption of a liquid supplement containing phosphoric acid, protein, molasses, and other minerals. Upon investigation, it was found that the liquid supplement was being used heavily by the animal as a source of phosphorous. Consequently, we discovered if animals had access to a phosphorous source on a free choice basis, over-consumption of the liquid ceased. We then extended this concept to other vitamins and minerals: if the animal was able to select phosphorous on a free choice basis, perhaps calcium could be selected in the same manner – success!
…In time, potassium, sulfur, silicon, magnesium, vitamins, and trace minerals were added to the list. Finally, there were 16 separate vitamins and minerals fed free choice.
These findings should be independently and widely replicated before we treat them as strong evidence, but if true, this suggests that cows have drives for each of these vitamins and minerals. If they didn’t have a drive for sulfur, why would they spend their time eating it?
4. In Which We Speculate About What Emotions There Are
The first major achievement for psychology may be a complete list of all the drives, governors, and emotions — each drive comes from a governor, and the emotion is that governor’s error signal. The most obvious analogy is to chemistry. This will be our version of the periodic table.
We’re still a long way off from this list being completed, but we can make some educated guesses about what will be on there once it’s finished. You just heard a lot of those guesses in the previous sections — now, we’ll put those guesses together into a rough draft.
A slightly unorthodox, yet promising list of the emotions
For now, we’ll try to call each governor by the name of its error signal — drives to eat come from a governor whose error is hunger, so these are hunger governors. The drive to keep yourself from physical harm comes from a governor whose error is pain, so this is the pain governor.
That said, there are a few cases where it’s easier to call a governor by some other name. It’s nice when we have existing terms like “thirst” already on hand, but there are some emotions that don’t have a common name, at least not in English. So sometimes we will punt and call these drives only “a drive to do X”, where X is the characteristic behavior that makes us suspect there’s a drive there in the first place.
The big question at this point is whether this can be more than just a list. The chemical elements have a periodic structure, their properties repeat in a regular pattern. This repetition, or periodicity, is visually organized in the periodic table, where elements are grouped into rows and columns to highlight these patterns. That’s the whole reason to have the periodic table in the first place — it’s more than just a list, and it eventually led to a better understanding of how the properties of elements are related to their atomic structure.
Maybe there is no structure or pattern to the drives, and we will just end up with a long list. But if there’s any kind of pattern or structure, we’d love to come up with an organization that highlights that structure, instead of just listing the drives one by one.
To make an early attempt, for now we will group the drives in three categories: physiological emotions, that attend to the basics needed to keep the body functioning; environmental emotions, that attend to the qualities of a person’s immediate external environment; and social emotions, that attend to a person’s social status and relations.
Physiological
Suffocation/Panic
Pain
Hot
Cold
Exhaustion
Waking
Thirst
Hunger (actually several drives)
Satiety (stops us from eating; also probably several drives)
A drive to fidget and be active that burns excess calories
A drive to have a clean and organized living space (The Sims called it “Room”)
A drive to have a clean and well-groomed body
Possibly decorative drives (though these may be extension of cleanliness drives)
Possibly a drive to dig
Possibly a drive to look at animals
Possibly a drive to collect or hoard
Possibly a drive to sort
Social
A drive to regulate social status up
A drive to keep social status from growing too fast
A drive for physical contact; “touch starved”
A drive for privacy, perhaps territorial
A drive for autonomy
A drive to socially dominate
Possibly a desire to follow or submit
Self-consciousness (an error when you are not acting consistently or normatively)
Empathy
Grief (the drive is to care for others, but the error signal is grief)
Loneliness
Anger
Shame
The list should also include other signals that are not cybernetic control errors. Here’s our current best guess for that list:
Happiness
Surprise
Curiosity
Happiness and surprise are two things we subjectively experience all the time, but they don’t seem to be cybernetic control errors. They also don’t seem to drive behavior.
In contrast, curiosity doesn’t seem to be a cybernetic control error, because it doesn’t seem to drive a target to zero, but curiosity does seem to drive behavior. As we speculated above, we think curiosity may be an adversarial signal that teaches us about the world by voting for us to explore options that our governors wouldn’t vote for on their own.
If the history of psychology is any indication, people will want to jump straight to figuring out the social emotions. We think this is a mistake. The social emotions will probably be the hardest to uncover.
There are two reasons to leave the social emotions for later.
First, we don’t know what the social emotions might be controlling. If there really is a dominance emotion, what is it targeting? It can’t literally be “the image of someone wailing at your feet.” It’s going to be something more subtle, and we don’t currently know how to capture or measure that thing.
Second, investigating the social emotions is impractical. If you want to be able to alter someone’s social status at will for an experiment, you kinda have to put people in a Biodome or a VR world. Even then, it’s hard to be sure you’re really evoking what goes on in the regular world.
We have much stronger suspicions about what the physiological drives control, and investigating them doesn’t require us to build a whole alternative society. You can just make people eat salt or not eat salt and see what happens.
And because other animals probably share a lot of our physiological emotions, we can run studies on them that would be unethical or impractical to run on humans. You can’t study the social emotions in other animals because other animals probably don’t have most of the social emotions that humans do. Maybe dolphins or elephants, but they’re hard to study.
We should start with something easier. We should start by studying emotions like hunger and fatigue, then use what we’ve learned to eventually understand the social emotions.
In chemistry, we discovered the gases first, then later got around to the other elements. In psychology, we will probably learn about the physiological drives first. We may cut our teeth on hunger before working up to things like fatigue, pain, fear, and eventually the social emotions, which are probably the most baroque and complex.
It’s true that the social drives are the most interesting, and it might seem like understanding the social drives might be more important, might solve more of the problems you care about. But be patient. You have to spend some time rolling balls down ramps before you can go to the moon.
When people talk about the ethical treatment of animals, they tend to hash it out in terms of consciousness.
But figuring out whether animals have consciousness, and figuring out what consciousness even is, are philosophical problems so hard they may be impossible to solve.
There’s not much common ground. The main thing people are generally willing to agree on is that since they themselves are conscious, other humans are probably conscious too, since other humans behave more or less like they do and are built in more or less the same way.
So a better question might be whether or not animals feel specific emotions, especially fear and pain.
The cybernetic paradigm gives a pretty clear answer to this question: Anything that controls threat and danger has an error signal that is equivalent to fear. And anything that controls injury has an error signal that is equivalent to pain.
This allows us to say with some confidence that animals like cows and rats feel fear, pain, and many other sophisticated emotions.
There’s no reason to suspect that a cow or a rat’s subjective experience of fear is meaningfully different from a human’s. We can’t prove this, but we can appeal to the same intuition that tells you that since you are conscious, other humans are probably conscious as well.
You believe that other humans feel fear, and that their fear is as subjectively terrifying to them as your fear is to you, for a simple reason: you notice that another person’s external behavior is much the same as yours is when you feel afraid, and is happening under similar circumstances. Then, you make the reasonable assumption that since all humans are biologically similar to one another, their external behavior is likely caused by similar internal rules and structures. Since there’s no reason to suspect that basically the same behavior created by basically the same structures would be any different phenomenologically, you conclude that other humans probably have the same kind of subjective experience.
With a better model for the emotions, this same logic can extend to other animals. Assuming we are right that a cow also has a governor dedicated to keeping it safe, which generates an error signal of increasing strength as danger increases, which drives behavior much like the behavior we engage in when we are afraid, there is little reason to suspect that the cow’s subjective experience is meaningfully different from our own. At the very least, if you accept the conclusion for humans, it’s not clear why you would reject it for other animals.
This is a relatively easy conclusion to draw for other complex, social mammals. They almost certainly feel fear and pain, because we see the outward signs, and because the inside machinery is overall so similar. But it’s harder to tell as animals become less and less closely related to humans.
An animal that doesn’t bother to avoid danger or injury clearly isn’t controlling for them. But most animals do. So the question is whether these animals actually represent danger and injury within a control system, trying to minimize some error, or if they simply avoid danger and injury through stimulus-response.
Dogs probably feel fear, and even without dissecting their brains, we can reasonably assume that they use similar mechanisms as we do. They’re built on the same basic mammalian plan and inherit the same hardware. But what about squid, or clams? These animals probably avoid danger in some way, but it’s not clear that they use an approach at all like the one we do.
If an animal cybernetically controls for danger and injury, then they are producing an error signal. In this case, the argument from above applies — there’s no reason to suspect that a creature using the same algorithms to accomplish the same thing is having a notably different experience. Their error signal is probably perceived as an emotion similar to our emotions.
But if an animal’s reaction to danger is instead a programmed response to a set stimulus, then there is no control system, no feedback loop, and no error signal.
For example, we might encounter an arthropod that freezes when we walk nearby. At first this looks like a fear response. We imagine that the arthropod is terrified and trying to avoid being seen and eaten.
But through trial and error, we show that whenever a shadow passes over it, the arthropod always freezes for exactly 2.5 seconds. Let’s further say that the arthropod shows no other signs of danger avoidance. If you “threaten” it in other ways, put it in other apparently dangerous situations, it changes its behavior not at all. The only thing it responds to is a shadow suddenly passing overhead.
ARE YOU CONSCIOUS???
This suggests that, at least for the purposes of handling danger, this arthropod operates purely on stimulus-response. As a result, it probably does not feel anything like the human emotion of fear. Even if we allow that the arthropod is conscious in some sense, its conscious experience is probably very different from ours because it is based on a different kind of mechanism.
Here’s a similar example from Russel & Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. We can’t confirm that what they describe is actually true of dung beetles — it may be apocryphal — but it’s a good illustration of the idea:
Consider the lowly dung beetle. After digging its nest and laying its eggs, it fetches a ball of dung from a nearby heap to plug the entrance. If the ball of dung is removed from its grasp en route, the beetle continues its task and pantomimes plugging the nest with the nonexistent dung ball, never noticing that it is missing. Evolution has built an assumption into the beetle’s behavior, and when it is violated, unsuccessful behavior results.
It’s hard to figure out whether an organism is controlling some variable, or whether it is running some kind of brute stimulus-response, especially if the stimulus-response routine is at all complicated. We may need to develop new experimental techniques to do this.
But every organism has to maintain homeostasis of some kind, and almost all multicellular organisms have a nervous system, which suggests they’re running some kind of feedback loop, which means some kind of error signal, which means some kind of emotion.
For now, we think this is a relatively strong argument that most other mammals experience fear and pain the same way that we do — at least as strong of an argument that other humans experience fear and pain the same way that you experience them.
Figuring out whether you are in danger requires much more of a brain than figuring out whether you have been cut or injured. So while most animals probably feel pain, some animals may not feel fear, especially those with simple nervous systems, those with very little ability to perceive their environment, and those who are immobile. There’s no value in being able to perceive danger if you can’t do anything about it.
Some “artificial intelligence” is designed like a tool. You put in some text, it spits out an image. You give it a prompt, it keeps predicting the following tokens. End of story.
But other “artificial intelligence” is more like an organism. These agentic AI are designed to have goals, and to meet them.
Agentic AI is usually designed around a reward function, a description of things that are “rewarding” to the agent, in the somewhat circular sense that the agent is designed to maximize reward.
Reward-maximizing agents are inherently dangerous, for a couple of reasons that can be stated plainly.
First, Goodhart’s law(“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) means that the goal we intend the agent to have will almost never be the goal it ends up aiming for.
For example, you might want a system that designs creatures that can move very fast. So you give the agent a reward function that rewards the design of creatures with high velocities. Unfortunately the agent responds with the strategy, “creatures grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over”. This matches the goal as stated, but does not really give you what you want.
Even with very simple agents, this happens all the time. The agent does not have to be very “intelligent” in the normal sense to make this happen. It’s just in the nature of reward functions.
This is also called goal mis-specification. Whatever goal you think you have specified, you almost always specify something else by mistake. When the agent pursues its real goal, that may cause problems.
Second, complexity. Simple goals are hard enough. But anything with complex behavior will need to have a complex reward function. This makes it very difficult to know you’re pointing it in the right direction.
You might think you can train your agent to have complex goals. Let it try various things and say, “yes, more of that” and “no, less of that” until it has built up a reward function that tends to give the behavior we want. This might work in the training environment, but because the reward function has been inferred through training, we don’t know what that reward function really is. It might actually be maximizing something weird. And you might not learn what it’s really maximizing until it’s too late to stop it.
The third and most serious reason is that anything insatiable is dangerous. Something that always wants more, and will stop at nothing to get it, is a problem. For a reward-maximizing agent, no amount of reward can ever be enough. It will always try to drive reward to infinity.
This seems fine
This is part of why AI fears usually center around runaway maximizers. The silly but canonical example is an AI with a reward function with a soft spot for office supplies, so it converts all matter in the universe into paperclips.
The same basic idea applies to any reward maximizer. If the United States Postal Service made an AI to deliver packages, and designed it to get a reward every time a package was delivered, that AI would be incentivized to find a way to deliver as many packages as possible, for the minimum possible descriptions of “deliver” and “packages”, by any means necessary. This would probably lead to the destruction of all humans and soon all life on earth.
But there are reasons to be optimistic.
For starters, the main reason to expect that artificial intelligence is possible is the existence of natural intelligence. If you can build a human-level intelligence out of carbon, it seems reasonably likely that you could build something similar out of silicon.
But humans and all other biological intelligences are cybernetic minimizers, not reward maximizers. We track multiple error signals and try to reduce them to zero. If all our errors are at zero — if you’re on the beach in Tahiti, a drink in your hand, air and water both the perfect temperature — we are mostly comfortable to lounge around on our chaise.
Could an artificial intelligence do THIS?
As a result, it’s not actually clear if it’s possible to build a maximizing intelligence. The only intelligences that exist are minimizing. There has never been a truly intelligent reward maximizer (if there had, we would likely all be dead), so there is no proof of concept. The main reason to suspect AI is possible is that natural intelligence already exists — us.
That said, it may still be possible to build a maximizing agent. If we do, there’s reason to suspect it will be very different from us, since it will be built on different principles. And there’s reason to suspect it would be very dangerous.
A reward maximizer doesn’t need to be intelligent to be dangerous. Maximizing pseudointelligences could still be very dangerous. Viruses are not very smart, but they can still kill you and your whole family.
We should avoid building things with reward functions, since they’re inherently dangerous. Instead, if you must build artificial intelligences, make them cybernetic, like us.
This is preferable because cybernetic minimizers are relatively safe. Once they get to their equivalent of “lying on the beach in Tahiti with a piña colada in hand” they won’t take any actions.
If the United States Postal Service designed an AI so that it minimizes the delivery time of packages instead of being rewarded for each successful delivery, it might still stage a coup to prevent any new packages from being sent. But once no more packages are being sent, it should be perfectly content to go to sleep. It will not try to consume the universe — it just wants to keep a number near zero.
Reward maximizers are always unstable. Even very simple reinforcement learning agents show very crazy specification behaviors. But control systems can be made very stable. They have their own problems, but we use them all the time, in thermostats, cruise control, satellites, and nuclear engineering. These systems work just fine. When control systems do fail, they usually fail by overreacting, underreacting, oscillating wildly, freaking out in an endless loop, giving up and doing nothing, and/or exploding. This is bad for the system, and bad when the system controls something important, like a nuclear power plant. But it doesn’t destroy the universe.
At the most basic level, these two approaches are the two kinds of feedback loops. Cybernetic agents run on negative feedback loops, which generally go towards zero and are relatively safe. Reward-maximizing agents are an example of positive feedback loops, which given enough resources will always go towards infinity, so they’re almost always dangerous. Remember, a nuclear explosion is a classic positive feedback loop. The only reason nuclear explosions stop is that they run out of fuel.
A possible rebuttal to this argument is that even if an agent is happy to move towards a resting state and then do nothing, it will still be interested in gaining as much power as possible so it can achieve its goals in the future. The technical term here is instrumental convergence.
Here we can appeal to observations of the cybernetic intelligences all around us. Humans, dogs, deer, mice, squid, etc. do not empirically seem to spend every second of their downtime maniacally working to gather more resources and power. Even with our unique human ability to plan far ahead, we often seem to use our free time to watch TV.
This suggests that instrumental convergence is not a problem for cybernetic agents. When more power is needed to correct its error, maybe a governor will vote for actions that increase the agent’s power. But if it already has enough power to correct its error, the governor will prefer to correct its error straightaway. This suggests we pursue instrumental goals like “gather more power and resources” mainly when we don’t have the capabilities we need to effectively cover all our drives.
Finally, a few things we should mention.
Cybernetic intelligences can’t become paperclip maximizers, but they can still be dangerous for other reasons. Hitler was not a paperclip maximizer, but even as a mere cybernetic organism, he was still pretty dangerous. So be careful with AI nonetheless.
Cybernetically controlling one or more values is good, natural even. But controlling derivatives (the rate of change in some value) is bad! You will end up with runaway growth that looks almost the same as a reward maximizer. If you design your cybernetic greenhouse AI to control the rate of growth of plants in your greenhouse (twice as many plants every week!), very soon it will need to control the whole universe to give you the number of plants you implicitly requested.
Controlling second derivatives (rate of change of the rate of change) is VERY BAD. Controlling third and further derivatives is right out.
In 1796, Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne noticed that his layabout assistant, David Kinnebrook, was getting measurements of celestial events that were a whole half-second different from his own. Maskelyne told Kinnebrook he had better shape up, but this didn’t help — Kinnebrook’s errors increased to around 8/10 of a second, so Maskelyne fired him.
Later astronomers looked into this more closely and discovered that there was actually nothing wrong with poor Kinnebrook. The issue is that people all have slightly different reaction times. When a star passes in front of a wire, it takes you some very small amount of time to react and record your observation. So when different people look at the same celestial event, they get slightly different results. You might even say that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
More importantly, these differences aren’t random. Kinnebrook’s measurements were always slightly later than Maskelyne’s, and always later by about the same amount. This is a consistent and personal bias, so they came up with the term “personal equation” to describe these differences.
As astronomers learned to measure these personal equations with more and more accuracy, they found that people can’t distinguish anything less than 0.10 seconds, which eventually spiraled into what has been called the tenth-of-a-second crisis. Further investigation of this effect, combined with similar research in physiology and statistics, eventually led to the invention of a new field: psychology.
The personal equation is frequently mentioned in psychology from the 19th and early 20th century. Edwin G. Boring devoted an entire chapter of his 1929 book to the personal equation, the story of which, he said, “every psychologist knows”. Even as late as 1961, he was writing about “the sacred 0.10 sec.”
Experimental psychology did not even start with experiments of its own; it rather took its problems at first from the neighbouring sciences. There was the physiologist or the physician who made careful experiments on the functions of the eye and the ear and the skin and the muscles, and who got in this way somewhat as by-products interesting experimental results on seeing and hearing and touching and acting; and yet all these by-products evidently had psychological importance. Or there was the physicist who had to make experiments to find out how far our human senses can furnish us an exact knowledge of the outer world; and again his results could not but be of importance for the psychology of perception. Or there was perhaps the astronomer who was bothered with his “personal equation,” as he was alarmed to find that it took different astronomers different times to register the passing of a star. The astronomers had, therefore, in the interest of their calculations, to make experiments to find out with what rapidity an impression is noticed and reacted upon. But this again was an experimental result which evidently concerned, first of all, the student of mental life.
All three of these examples, including the personal equation, are about perception — physiologists studying the sense organs, and physicists studying the limits of those senses. Given this foundation, it will come as no surprise to hear that for most of its history, psychology’s main focus has been perception. Even in the early days of psychology, perception was baked in.
This was most obvious in the earliest forms of psychology. In 1898, E. Bradford Titchener wrote a paper describing the layout of his psychology lab at Cornell. This lab not only had a room for optics, but separate rooms also for acoustics, haptics, and one “taste and smell room”. Olfactometry does not come up much in modern psychology, but the Cornell psychologists of the 1890s had an entire room dedicated to it:
Room 1, the ‘optics room,’ is a large room, lighted from three sides, with walls and ceiling painted a cream. Room 2, intended for the private room of the laboratory assistants, now serves the purposes to which room 12 will ultimately be put. Room 3 is the ‘acoustics,’ room 4 the ‘haptics room.’ Room 5 is a dark room employed for drill-work, demonstration and photography. Room 6 is the ‘work,’ and room 7 the ‘lecture-room’. Room 8 is the director’s private room ; room 9 the ‘reaction,’ and room 10 the ‘taste and smell room’. Room 11, which faces north, will be fitted up as a research dark room; room 12 will be furnished with the instruments used in the investigation of the physiological processes underlying affective consciousness, —pulse, respiration, volume and muscular tone.
Even today, the closest thing to a true law of psychology is the Weber-Fechner law, about the minimum possible change needed to be able to distinguish between two similar stimuli; in other words, about perception. And the most impressive artifacts of psychology are still visual illusions like this one:
The two orange circles are exactly the same size; however, the one on the right appears larger.
During the cognitive revolution, a lot of sacred cows were tipped, but not perception. Instead, perception was reaffirmed as the absolute main topic of psychological study. Ulric Neisser’s 1967 book Cognitive Psychology consists of:
One introductory chapter, titled “The Cognitive Approach”
Five chapters on visual processes
Four chapters on hearing
And one last chapter, about which he says: “The final chapter on memory and thought is essentially an epilogue, different in structure from the rest of the book.”
That’s it!
In a footnote, Neisser apologizes… for not covering the other senses. “Sense modalities other than vision and hearing are largely ignored in this book,” he says, “because so little is known about the cognitive processing involved.” But he doesn’t apologize for skipping over nearly every other aspect of psychology, which seems like a stunning omission.
At least Neisser is self-aware about this. He makes it very clear that he knows many different directions psychology could take, and that he is picking this one, cognition, over all the others. It’s just that he is fully committed to the promise of the cognitive approach, and that means he’s fully committed to the idea that perception should hold center stage — not just top billing, but to the point of excluding other parts of psychology.
Even given psychology’s previous hundred years of focus on perception, this was a pretty radical position. Titchener would probably be scandalized that Neisser didn’t include a chapter on taste and smell.
But the most surprising omission of all might be “individual differences”, the psychologist’s fancy term for personality. Because once upon a time, personality was almost as central to psychology as perception was.
Recall that the personal equation, one of the problems that kicked off psychology in the first place, was itself an idea about individual differences — every individual had a personal difference in their reaction times when looking at the celestial spheres. You can’t have a personal equation without individual differences, so as much as the personal equation came with an interest in the laws of perception, it also came with a committed interest in personality.
Almost as old as the personal equation is the idea of mental tests. Most of the credit and the blame for these goes to Sir Francis Galton. After hearing about the theory of evolution from his cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton started wondering if mental traits ran in families. He became obsessed with measuring differences in people’s minds and bodies, and these ideas directly led to the invention of IQ tests (and also eugenics). These unpleasant grandchildren aside, for a long time mental tests were a really central part of psychology. Until one day they weren’t.
Neisser does offer a defense of his position in the last chapter of his book. We think the final paragraph is especially interesting, where he says:
It is no accident that the cognitive approach gives us no way to know what the subject will think of next. We cannot possibly know this, unless we have a detailed understanding of what he is trying to do, and why. For this reason, a really satisfactory theory of the higher mental processes can only come into being when we also have theories of motivation, personality, and social interaction. The study of cognition is only one fraction of psychology, and it cannot stand alone.
Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” in the summer of 1947, but for the full story, we have to go much further back.
Wiener places the earliest origins of these ideas with the 17th century German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. “If I were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics out of the history of science,” Wiener wrote in the introduction to his book, “I should have to choose Leibniz. The philosophy of Leibniz centers about two closely related concepts—that of a universal symbolism and that of a calculus of reasoning. From these are descended the mathematical notation and the symbolic logic of the present day.”
Simple control systems have been in use for more than two thousand years, but things really picked up when Leibniz’ early math tutor, Christiaan Huygens, derived the laws for centrifugal force and invented an early centrifugal governor.
Over the centuries people slowly made improvements to Huygens’ design, most notably James Watt, who added one to his steam engine. These systems caught the attention of James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1868 wrote a paper titled “On Governors”, where he explained instabilities exhibited by the flyball governor by modeling it as a control system.
When explaining why he chose to call his new field “cybernetics”, Wiener wrote, “in choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of κυβερνήτης.”
Using this background, Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth sat down and made the field explicit in the 1940s, and gave it a name. Then in 1948 Wiener published his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and the field went public.
The new field went in a number of directions, many of them unproductive, but the one most important to us today is the direction taken up by a certain William T. Powers.
Loop Me In
Psychology and cybernetics were making eyes at each other across the room from the very start. “The need of including psychologists had indeed been obvious from the beginning,” wrote Wiener. “He who studies the nervous system cannot forget the mind, and he who studies the mind cannot forget the nervous system.” And the psychologists returned Wiener’s affections: Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of modern social psychology, attended the first “Macy Conference” on cybernetics, all the way back in 1946, before it was even called cybernetics, and Weiner mentions Lewin (and some other psychologists) by name in his book.
But in the 1940s and 1950s, psychologists felt they were doing pretty all right. Lewin and the social psychologists were a relatively small slice of psychology, the minority faction by far, and their interest didn’t carry much weight. Cybernetics might be nice to flirt with at the party, but there was no real chance of inviting it home.
But fast forward to the 1970s, and psychology was in crisis. For a long time psychology had been ruled by behaviorism, a paradigm which took the stance that while behavior could be studied scientifically, the idea of studying thoughts or mental states was wooly nonsense. Mental states like thoughts and feelings were certainly unworthy of study, and possibly didn’t exist.
Behaviorists also thought that animals are born without anything at all in their brains — that the mind at birth is a blank slate, and that everything an animal learns to do comes from pure stimulus-response learning built up over time.
Behaviorism seemed like a sure bet in the 1920s, but those assumptions were looking more and more shaky every day. People had discovered that animals did seem to have inborn tendencies to associate some things with other things. They learned that you could make reasonable inferences about mental states. And the invention of the digital computer made the study of mental states seem much more scientific. The old king was dying, and no one could agree who was rightful heir to the throne.
it looked exactly like this
The son of a “well-known cement scientist”, William T. Powers wasn’t even a psychologist. His training was in physics and astronomy. But while working at a cancer research hospital, and later while designing astronomy equipment, Powers started pulling different threads together and eventually came up with his own very electrical-engineering-inspired paradigm for psychology, which he called Perceptual Control Theory.
In 1973 Powers published both a book and an article in Science about his ideas. While Powers was obviously an outsider, psychologists took this work seriously. Even in the 1970s, fringe ideas didn’t get published in a journal as big as Science — Powers and his arguments were mainstream, at least for a little while.
Psychologists really thought that cybernetics might be one of the ways forward. Stanley Milgram, who did the famous experiments on obedience to authority — the ones where participants thought they might be delivering lethal electric shocks to a man with a heart condition, but mostly kept increasing the voltage when politely asked to continue — even includes a brief section on cybernetics in his 1974 book about those studies. “While these somewhat general [cybernetic] principles may seem far removed from the behavior of participants in the experiment,” he says, “I am convinced that they are very much at the root of the behavior in question.”
And Thomas Kuhn himself, the greatest authority on crisis and revolution in science (he did write the book on it), wrote a glowing review of Powers’ book, saying:
Powers’ manuscript, “Behavior: The Control of Perception”, is among the most exciting I have read in some time. The problems are of vast importance, and not only to psychologists; the achieved synthesis is thoroughly original and the presentation is often convincing and almost invariably suggestive. I shall be watching with interest what happens in the directions in which Powers points.
But there were a few problems.
The first is that Powers’ work, especially his 1973 Science article, doesn’t exactly make the case that cybernetics is a good way of thinking about psychology. It’s more of an argument that cybernetics is better than behaviorism. The paper is filled with beautiful and specific arguments, but they’re arguments against the behaviorist paradigm. The article is even titled, Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism.
You can see why Powers would frame things this way. As far as he could tell, behaviorism was the system to beat, and his arguments against behaviorism really are compelling.
Unfortunately, by 1973 behaviorism was already on its way out. Six years before, in 1967, Ulric Neisser wrote:
A generation ago, a book like this one would have needed at least a chapter of self-defense against the behaviorist position. Today, happily, the climate of opinion has changed, and little or no defense is necessary. Indeed, stimulus-response theorists themselves are inventing hypothetical mechanisms with vigor and enthusiasm and only faint twinges of conscience.
Powers’ work arrived early enough that psychologists were still interested in what he had to say. They still felt that their field was in crisis, they were still looking around for new tools and new perspectives. They were still willing to publish his paper, and everybody read his book.
But it came late enough in the crisis that there was strong competition. New schools of thought were already mustering their forces, already had serious claims to the throne. People were already picking sides. And most people were already picking cognitive psychology.
It’s not entirely clear exactly why cognitive psychology won, but there are a few things that made its claim especially strong. For one, some of the strongest evidence against behaviorism came from an information theory angle, and this looked really good for cognitive psychology, which proposed that we think of the mind in terms of how it handles and transforms information.
Maybe most importantly, the metaphor of the digital computer promised to provide the objectivity that behaviorism was never able to deliver. Whatever else might be going on in human minds, computers definitely exist, they can add and subtract, and that looks a lot like thinking! Cognitive psychology eventually won out.
which is why all psychologists now look like this
Another problem is that cybernetics is what they call “dynamic”. This is a distinction people don’t usually make any more, but Ulric Neisser gives this definition:
Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man’s actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject’s goals, needs, or instincts.
Cybernetics makes for a dynamic school of psychology because, however you slice it, control systems are always about getting signals back in alignment, so they’re always about goals (what’s the target value) and needs (which signals are controlled). If you think about psychology in terms of control systems, whatever you come up with is going to be dynamic.
Dynamic theories were very popular in the first half of the 20th century, but they ended up falling out of favor in the back half. Again, we’re not entirely sure why this happened the way it did, but we can provide some reasonable speculation.
The most famous dynamic school of psychology is Freudian psychodynamic therapy. If you’ve ever wondered, this is why it has “dynamic” in the name, because it’s a paradigm that focuses on how people are motivated by drives and/or needs. Freudians originally saw all behavior as motivated by libido, the sex or pleasure principle. But later on they added a second drive or set of drives called mortido, the drive for death.
Most schools of psychology are more dynamic than they would like to admit — even behaviorism. Sure, behaviorists had an extremely reductive understanding of drives (mostly “reward” and “punishment”), but at their heart they were a dynamic school too. Reward and punishment are a theory of motivation; it’s only one drive, but it’s right there, and central to the paradigm. And behaviorists did sometimes admit other drives, most blatantly in Clark Hull’s drive reduction theory, which allowed for drives like thirst and hunger.
Behaviorists have to accept some kind of dynamics because they assume that reward and punishment are behind all behavior, except perhaps the most instinctual. Even if they didn’t tend to think of this as a drive, it’s clearly the motive force that behaviorists used to explain all behavior — organisms are maximizing reward and minimizing punishment.
(In a totally different kind of problem, dynamic psychology is always a bit risky because it’s inherently annoying to speculate about someone’s motives. The Freudians really ran afoul of this one.)
The point is, by the time William Powers was arguing for cybernetics, dynamic psychology was on the downswing. Its reputation was tainted by the Freudians, and maybe it also smelled a bit too much like the behaviorists, with their focus on reward and punishment. This might be another reason why cybernetics was passed over in favor of something that seemed a bit more fresh and promising.
It’s not like people hated cybernetics, but it’s interesting to see how conscious the decision was. Near the end of his book, Neisser says:
An analogy to the “executive routines” of computer programs shows that an agent need not be a homunculus. However, it is clear that motivation enters at several points in these processes to determine their outcome. Thus, an integration of cognitive and dynamic psychology is necessary to the understanding of the higher mental processes.
But the rest of cognitive psychology did not inherit this understanding, and this integration was never carried out; as far as we know it was never even attempted. In any case, dynamic paradigms were out.
Other schools like social psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry kept going with what they were doing, since they were not seen to be in crisis, and they gained more sway as behaviorism fell apart. Or perhaps a better read on things is that the ground previously held by behaviorism was partitioned, with cognitive psychology gaining the most, social psychologists also receiving a large chunk, clinical psychologists gaining some, etc. Cybernetics received none, and fell into obscurity.
Or possibly it was diluted into a vague branch of the humanities. The full title of Wiener’s book was Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Some anthropologists may have taken the “communication” part too seriously — they started using the term more and more vaguely, until eventually they used it to refer to anything at all involving communication, which is probably where the internet got the vague epithet of “cyberspace”.
Today, psychology generally acts as though drives do not exist. If you look in your textbook you will usually see a brief mention of drives, but they’re not a priority. For example, one psychology textbook says,
All organisms are born with some motivations and acquire others through experience, but calling these motivations “instincts” describes them without explaining how they operate. Drive-reduction theory explains how they operate by suggesting that disequilibrium of the body produces drives that organisms are motivated to reduce.
But the very next sentence concludes:
Neither instinct nor drive are widely used concepts in modern psychology, but both have something useful to teach us.
The subtext in today’s psychology is that there is only one real drive, with two poles, reward and punishment. When psychologists explicitly name this assumption, they call it “the hedonic principle”. Despite any lip service paid to other drives, simple hedonism is the theory of motivation that psychologists actually use.
A cruel irony is that modern cognitive psychology, as far as we can tell, inherited this theory of motivation directly from behaviorism. This is just good ‘ol reward and punishment. Even though they held the cognitive revolution to throw out behaviorism and replace it with something new, they weren’t able to disinherit themselves of some of the sneakier assumptions.
The other funny thing is that when outsiders come up with their own version of psychology, they usually end up including drives. Our favorite example continues to be The Sims. To get somewhat realistic behavior out of their Sims, Maxis had to give them several different drives, so they did. Even psychologists can’t help inventing new drives by accident. If you hang around psychology long enough, you’ll run into various “need for whatever” scales, like the famous need for cognition.
This reminds us a lot of what happened in alchemy. Alchemists were supposed to believe in air, fire, water, and earth, and explain the world in terms of those four elements. But belief in four elements was impossible, and the alchemists told on themselves, because they couldn’t stop inventing new ones. In the preface to his book on chemistry, Lavosier says (emphasis added):
The notion of four elements, which, by the variety of their proportions, compose all the known substances in nature, is a mere hypothesis, assumed long before the first principles of experimental philosophy or of chemistry had any existence. In those days, without possessing facts, they framed systems; while we, who have collected facts, seem determined to reject them, when they do not agree with our prejudices. The authority of these fathers of human philosophy still carry great weight, and there is reason to fear that it will even bear hard upon generations yet to come.
It is very remarkable, that, notwithstanding of the number of philosophical chemists who have supported the doctrine of the four elements, there is not one who has not been led by the evidence of facts to admit a greater number of elements into their theory. The first chemists that wrote after the revival of letters, considered sulphur and salt as elementary substances entering into the composition of a great number of substances; hence, instead of four, they admitted the existence of six elements. Beccher assumes the existence of three kinds of earth, from the combination of which, in different proportions, he supposed all the varieties of metallic substances to be produced.
So likewise, notwithstanding the number of psychologists who have supported the doctrine of reward and punishment, there is not one who has not been led by the evidence of facts to admit a greater number of drives into their theory.
Let’s not beat around the bush. This series is an attempt to introduce a new cybernetic paradigm for psychology, and cause a scientific revolution, just like the ones they had in chemistry and astronomy and physics, just like Thomas Kuhn talked about.
We think that cybernetics will allow an angle of attack on many problems in psychology, and we’re going to do our best to make that case. For example, one of psychology’s biggest hidden commitments is that for most of its history, it has focused on perception, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. But perception may not be the right way to approach the study of the mind. Problems that remain unsolved for a long time should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Cybernetics benefits because it doesn’t have such a strong commitment to perception — instead, it’s dynamic. The fact that dynamics is so different from the perception-based approach that has dominated psychology for most of the 200 years it’s been around seems like reason for optimism.
A lot of what we have to say about cybernetics comes from cyberneticists, especially Wiener and Powers. Some of what we say about psychological drives comes from earlier drive theorists. And some of what we think of as original will probably in fact turn out to be reinventing the wheel. Finally, everything we say comes from treating previous psychology as some mix of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
To most psychologists, asking “what emotions do rats have?” would be rather vague. But to a cybernetic psychologist, it makes perfect sense. It also makes sense to ask, “what emotions do rats and humans have in common?” From a cybernetic standpoint, there’s probably a precise answer to such questions.
Some of these questions may be disturbing in new and exciting ways. Are fish thirsty? Again, there may be a precise answer to this question.
There is something new in this work, but it’s also contiguous. We don’t want this to come across as though we’re saying this is unprecedented; this is all firmly grounded in historical traditions, it’s all inspired by things that have come before.
A crucial mood, the “No Really, Seriously, What Is Going On?” mood, the mood of true curiosity. I don’t know if they’ve found the truth, but I can tell they are earnestly looking.
— Emmett Shear
Freeze and Cower
Consider: You are in a terrible situation and your fear governor expects you to die in a horrifying way, -1000 points. There is nothing you can do, so you take the action “freeze and cower”. But instead, you survive and it’s not nearly as bad as expected, only -100 points.
Sounds great, right? Wrong! The sad truth is that as far as the fear governor can tell, “freeze and cower” has just given you +900 points! It is the best action you have ever taken, possibly the best action of all time. It doesn’t matter that the prediction was wrong, that things went badly but not as badly as the worst possible outcome, that’s not how the system works.
Your fear governor has learned that “freeze and cower” is the best action it can take. So whenever you feel fear in the future, it votes that you should freeze and cower, and you usually do. Since (in the modern world) most things you are afraid of do eventually go away if you freeze and cower for long enough, your fear governor continues to believe that “freeze and cower” is a good action, and keeps voting “freeze and cower” up and down the ballot.
This sounds a lot like PTSD. Take for example this description from Scott Alexander’s review of Van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps The Score:
Van der Kolk thinks that traumas are much more likely to cause PTSD when the victim is somehow unable to respond to them. Enemy soldiers shooting at you and you are running away = less likelihood of trauma. Enemy soldiers shooting at you and you are hiding motionless behind a tree = more likelihood of trauma. Speculatively, your body feels like its going into trauma mode hasn’t gotten you to take the right actions, and so the trauma mode cannot end.
In the real world PTSD is often more complex, but that added complexity usually makes things worse, not better. For example, a civilian is mostly not afraid of loud noises like fireworks, and the fear governor does not even pay attention. But if you go to war and you learn that loud noises are dangerous, they become something that your fear governor considers its rightful business. You also learn that “freeze and cower” is a great action that always seems to work. So you return to civilian life ready to freeze and cower not only when you encounter the things that have always scared you, but also in response to things that you previously would not have found frightening.
With enough exposure, this response might go away. But not all exposure will be equal. If we play a loud sound, and you freeze and cower, and nothing bad happens, this actually reinforces the response. It’s just more evidence that “freeze and cower” is a good action that is reliably followed by a safe outcome.
Instead, you need to play a loud noise, but quiet enough that you can force yourself to not freeze and cower. Over time, this should teach you that other actions, like “stand there calmly”, are just as good. But it may take a long time for these estimates to balance out. From our example above, “freeze and cower” is valued at +900 safety points. And it only got there because your fear governor expected to die, and then didn’t. So a program of exposure where you get exposed to a little danger at a time will take a long time to catch up.
The really weird implication here is that a faster form of exposure therapy might be to get you to freeze and cower, and then actually hurt you! This would hopefully teach your fear and pain governors that “freeze and cower” has negative value, and it should get you to that conclusion faster. That said, the ethics of actually harming your patients seems questionable.
We can also think a little bit about individual differences. Some people probably have faster or slower learning rates, and this makes them more or less easy to traumatize from a single event.
Remember this equation from earlier? There’s that term α, which is the learning rate. If the learning rate is high, then your opinion of an action will change a lot every time you try that action. So a person with a high learning rate is more likely to become traumatized from a single experience. Just one very good or bad experience with an action would hugely change their estimate of how reasonable it is to take that action. But someone with a low learning rate will only ever change their estimate of an action by a small amount, so would be less likely to get traumatized unless the same outcome happened to them over and over.
Some people have more or less previous experience with the frightening stimuli. If you have a lot of previous experiences with loud noises, then artillery explosions won’t be so unusual, and you probably won’t learn to treat all loud noises as dangerous. But if you grew up in the silence of rural North Dakota, the experience of an artillery barrage might teach a lesson that gets passed on to all loud noises, for lack of experience.
Never Drink Alone
Consider: Drugs often interfere with specific error signals.
Take alcohol, which is especially famous for the way it reduces feelings of shame. When you get drunk, you feel much less shame than you did before, and you might end up doing some very shameless things. It also seems to suppress emotions like fear and thirst, and maybe increases emotions like hunger and exhaustion, which is why you do something dangerous, eat a whole basket of fries, and then pass out.
Imagine a guy named Chris who has just turned 21. He goes out drinking for the first time and he is feeling pretty good. He isn’t feeling ashamed of anything at all, so the alcohol can’t reduce his feelings of shame, because shame is at zero.
A few weeks later, someone finds out a dark secret about Chris’s past and confronts him with it. Now Chris is feeling deeply ashamed. He has plans to go out drinking with friends though, so he still goes to join them. When he lifts the bottle of beer to his lips, he has a very large shame error signal. And when he drinks the alcohol, that shame error is reduced. By his fifth beer, he doesn’t feel ashamed at all.
What does his shame governor learn from this experience? It learns that drinking beer is a great way to reduce its error. This is great news for the shame governor, because there are not many ways to quickly reduce shame. It resolves to vote for Chris to drink beer in the future whenever he feels ashamed.
We see similar patterns across the world of drugs. Caffeine and amphetamines reduce fatigue and hunger. Opiates reduce pain. And MDMA seems to interact somehow with the social emotions — maybe it reduces shame while increasing other drives, ones that make people more social and touchy-feely.
With us so far? Let’s try a more complicated example.
Let’s say you are hanging around one day, feeling pretty ok. All your errors are close to zero, so you’re mostly in alignment. You’re a little chilly, but only a little: your cold governor has an error of 5 points.
You decide to take some amphetamines just for fun, like one does. You’ve never taken amphetamines before, but you feel fine and you have nothing better to do.
Let’s say that amphetamines have only one effect: they immediately change any error you have to zero. This lasts until the amphetamines wear off, at which point the error goes back to whatever it was before. So when you take the amphetamines, your cold error goes to zero for a while, and you no longer feel chilly.
Your cold governor picks up on this. Its job is to generate and keep track of that error, and keep track of ways to reduce that error towards zero. So your cold governor learns that “take amphetamines” reduces its error by about 5 points.
The amphetamines don’t actually change your body temperature (at least not in this hypothetical). They just adjust the error signal and temporarily turn it to zero. But your cold governor isn’t sensitive to this distinction. It’s wired to correct an error term. Anything that corrects the error is still a correction, and is perfect in your governor’s eyes.
It will remember this information, but this factoid doesn’t really matter because the correction is so small. A fairly normal option, like “put on a sweater”, is already valued at 50 points. Even “just stand there and shiver” is valued at 10 points! So your cold governor will remember that amphetamines correct its error a little bit, but it will never vote for amphetamines, since it will always have better options.
Later, you are feeling kind of tired and lonely. Let’s say your tired error is 50 and your loneliness error is 100. You would normally go to sleep when you’re this tired, but you want to go out to see friends. But all your friends happen to be out of town this weekend, and no one is responding to texts. So you’re doubly uncomfortable. You decide to try some amphetamines again, just for laughs.
What happens? Well, your tired error and your loneliness error both go to zero. Your tired and lonely governors dutifully mark this down in their ledgers: amphetamines have a +50 correction for tiredness and +100 correction against loneliness.
From the governors’ point of view, this is pretty good. Their only job is to reduce their error signals — they have no ability or reason to care about anything else. So they consider this drug just as good as or even better than their other options.
Now you are in trouble. Your governors have learned that amphetamines are a really good solution to being tired, and one of the best solutions ever to being lonely. In the future, your tired governor will often vote for you to take amphetamines instead of sleeping, and your loneliness governor will reliably vote for you to take amphetamines instead of anything else. From the governor’s point of view, why leave the house and socialize, which has a small chance of making you slightly less lonely, when you could take amphetamines and immediately feel not lonely at all.
Things will only get worse from here. As these two governors vote for you to take amphetamines, any other governors who happen to be out of alignment will learn the same bizarre lesson.
You get a little lonely, and so your loneliness governor votes for you to take some amphetamines. This time, your hunger governor also happens to be a bit out of alignment; you have an error of 20 for hunger.
When the loneliness governor makes you take amphetamines, your hunger error also goes to zero, and your hunger governor picks up on a new idea: amphetamines reduce hunger by about 20 points! That’s almost as good as a quesadilla. Now the hunger governor will often vote for amphetamines, since as far as it can tell, amphetamines are just as good as food. In fact, it will soon learn that amphetamines are better than food, since they correct its errors so reliably.
It’s probably clear why this is very dangerous. If you take a drug that reduces all error signals, then any governor with a large error signal when you take the drug (you’re hungry, you’re angry, etc.) learns to vote in favor of that drug, because it learns that the drug reduces its error signal. Because the drug reduces every error signal.
If you take the drug over and over, you dig yourself deeper every time. Different systems will be out of alignment each time you take the drug, so more governors will see that the drug corrects their error and will learn to vote for it. Eventually, all governors are voting for the drug — hunger is voting for the drug instead of eating, horny is voting for the drug instead of sex, and so on. And the drug feels pleasurable to take — it causes happiness when it corrects the errors, because correcting errors always causes happiness.
When the drug wears off, the error signal goes right back to where it was before. So you’re still tired, hungry, or whatever else. All you did was waste some hours.
You are now very truly addicted. Or at least, that’s what it looks like to us. If you follow this model to its logical conclusion, you get something that looks very much like addiction.
This fits with the observation that some people can take supposedly addictive drugs without getting addicted. In addition to things like genetic differences, if you don’t have large errors when you take your drugs, you won’t get addicted. If you’re already chair of the psychiatry department at Columbia, there’s not much more that drugs can do for you.
This may have something to do with why drug withdrawal feels like abstract “suffering” rather than bad in any particular way. If you have a serious addiction, then when the drug is taken away, every sense you have for finding something wrong with the world will be firing all at once, so in withdrawl you feel not only hungry and thirsty but also tired/pain/cold/hot/scared/angry/jealous/…
Your governors are always trying to estimate the value of different actions (value in the sense of what effect it will have on the signal they care about). But it’s impossible to accurately estimate the value of an action, like taking a drug, that temporarily sends all errors to zero. These drugs don’t have a true value — they interfere with the signal directly. Since they are so tangential to what your governors are trying to do, they really mess with your normal process of learning.
You are lonely — and smoking a cigarette will extinguish that loneliness for about 30 minutes. When it’s over, you will be just as lonely as before. But if you have no better options, the forces inside you that seek connection will still demand you smoke that cigarette, even against your better judgment. A promising but never-fulfilling solution to a basic desire is the core mechanism of addiction.
Most drugs don’t appear to interfere with every error signal, they only interfere with a few. If alcohol only interferes with your shame and your fear governors, then you would only get addicted to alcohol if you drink when you are ashamed and/or afraid. Your hunger or dominance governors won’t be tricked by alcohol, because it doesn’t mess with their signals.
The model predicts that you’re more likely to get addicted to a drug if you take it when you are out of equilibrium in some way. If you take a drug when all your error signals are near zero, then the drug won’t correct those errors by very much, it can’t. Your governors will learn that taking the drug only corrects their errors a bit, and will probably ignore it. This means that social drinking and social smoking might in fact be safer than other forms of smoking and drinking — the folk wisdom that says “never drink alone” may just be onto something.
This also implies some things about what it means to have an addictive personality, what kinds of people are more likely to get addicted to a substance. People with a high learning rate are more likely to get addicted, because their governors will take a single experience with a drug more seriously.
If two people take cocaine when their fatigue error is at 100 points, the drug sends both of their fatigue errors to zero. The person with the high learning rate estimates that the fatigue correction of cocaine is 80 points, and the person with the low learning rate estimates that the fatigue correction of cocaine is 20 points. Obviously one of these people will be more likely to take cocaine in the future, and will be more prone to a serious runaway addiction.
There are some kinds of addiction that don’t involve an external chemical at all. These addictions must have some other origin, since they don’t come about by directly messing with error signals in the brain. We think these can be explained in a couple of different ways.
First of all, the word “addiction” is used very broadly, to mean something like “a habit I do more than I’m supposed to” or “something I do all the time but I don’t endorse”. Sometimes addiction is just a word for something that’s not socially normal or something that is more extreme than normal.
When someone describes themselves as a sex addict, they are often just someone with an unusually high sex drive. Or when someone says they are addicted to cupcakes, they really just mean that their perfectly natural drive to eat sugar is in conflict with their drives to avoid shame and social stigma. Or when someone appears addicted to video games, but that person is in fact feeding their drive for domination in the only way that won’t get them into serious trouble.
This form of addiction can still be pathological. It’s possible that your drive for sex or for cupcakes is so strong that it prevents you from taking care of your other responsibilities, so strong that it comes to ruin your life. These drives are “natural” in the sense that you were born that way, but that doesn’t make them any less destructive. And it could still be pathological in the sense that it’s the result of illness or damage, like if your drive became unusually strong as a result of some kind of traumatic brain injury. But ultimately this “addiction” is one of your drives performing its functions in the normal way, just in a way that you don’t endorse.
One sign that these cases are extreme forms of normal behavior is that these addictions are all linked to one of the basic drives, like food or sex. Even some behaviors that are viewed as purely compulsive, like pica, may actually be the result of a drive that is not commonly recognized, like the drive to eat enough iron. The people on edible dirt etsy must be spending all that money on dirt for some reason. In comparison, we know that evolution did not give us a natural drive to do lines of cocaine. That’s an unnatural desire, driven by some kind of basic malfunction in the systems that are in charge of learning and motivation.
All that said, there are some kinds of addiction that aren’t obviously linked to any drive, and aren’t the result of drugs. The clearest example is gambling.
This kind of addiction might be explained by simple facts of learning. Gambling seems to be the most addictive when the rewards are really variable and the gambles happen on very short time loops. Or they might be most easily explained by something like time discounting — you can put off the shame of failure by doubling down, at least until you can’t anymore.
But the real lesson here might just be that there could be more than one kind of addiction. The idea of looking for a single explanation for every kind of compulsive behavior is exactly the kind of superficial word-chasing that we should try to avoid.
Bloody Knuckles
Consider: If cutting yourself gives -10 points, but stopping cutting gives +15 points, then your pain governor will consistently vote for you to cut yourself, so it can then vote for you to stop cutting yourself, netting it a cool 5 points. It will do this whenever you are idle enough that there’s nothing more important going on, when nothing else can beat out its votes.
We think of self-harm as pathological, but there may be some part of it that is very normal. There’s a famous study from 2015, where the authors put people alone in a room for 15 minutes, hooked up to a shock generator that they could shock themselves with as much as they want. They had previously felt the shock and said they found it painful, but 67% of men and 25% of women still chose to shock themselves at least once more, instead of sitting in silence for 15 minutes. Men gave themselves more shocks on average (an average of 1.47 shocks) than women (an average of 1.00 shocks), not counting one man who shocked himself 190 times.
This might follow the same logic as other self-harm, just on a smaller scale. If the shock is more startling than truly painful (-1 point), and the relief of not being shocked any more is a bit pleasant (+5 points) then it’s easy enough to end up in a situation where on net you enjoy shocking yourself.
This issue seems important for making cybernetic systems work. You need these numbers to be in the right ratio. Otherwise, you get caught in a loop — stick your head underwater so you get an error, then take it out so that the error is reduced. But self-harm does sometimes happen, meaning that whatever steps our psychology has taken to resolve this issue don’t work perfectly, or don’t work in every situation.
One way to save on energy, and keep an animal from getting too distracted, would be for governors to become dormant when they don’t have a very big error. After all, if they don’t have a big error, there’s not much they need to pay attention to. This seems to fit that trope where someone does something they thought they wanted, then immediately regrets the consequences. Why didn’t they see that coming? Because the governor that disapproves couldn’t get through. It was asleep.
If this is how we’re designed, then before self-harm the pain governor would be partially offline and wouldn’t be able to vote against “cut yourself”. Then it would be fully online for “stop cutting yourself”.
But this doesn’t work for a few reasons. First of all, governors do seem to get some votes even when their errors are at zero, which is obvious from how often they vote against stuff. If you’re nice and warm inside and you don’t want to slog out into the cold to scrape off your car, that’s your cold governor voting against it, even though it doesn’t have any error at the moment.
Pain seems like a governor that should always be at least somewhat awake. Pain is probably strong even if it’s dormant, because its main job is to prevent injury. It needs to be able to vote against dangers to life and limb, even when you’re not currently in any pain. The hunger governor can turn off when you’re not hungry, but the pain governor can’t turn off when you’re not in pain.
More importantly, even if the pain governor were off, then what governor would be voting for you to cut yourself in the first place? Maybe there’s a way to confuse the pain governor to vote for “hurt yourself then stop hurting yourself” but if so, it would need to be online to vote for it. It wouldn’t do that if it were dormant.
Maybe self-harm only works over very short time horizons. Pleasure and pain in the future should be both discounted, they should be counted as less than 100% of their values because the future is uncertain. Even if you expect something good or bad to happen, there’s always some chance that it won’t come through.
If negative events in 1 minute are weighted so that they’re less than positive events in 2 minutes, that could maybe lead to self-harm. Getting cut is 60% of -10 points, stopping getting cut is 80% of +8 points, suddenly the pain governor is happy to vote for one so it can get to the other.
A more straightforward explanation is that some other governor is voting for you to cut yourself, and it’s much more powerful than the pain governor, so it can overrule it. This is most obvious in cases like ritual self-harm, games like chicken or bloody knuckles. In this case, failing to go through with the painful or embarrassing experience would lose the confidence of your community, you would be ashamed, it would show that you were a loser or a coward. These are high enough stakes that other drives are able to out-vote the pain governor.
There might be many governors that could vote for this. For example, there might be an actual drive to harm others, that motivates things like sadism and serial killing. If you have a drive to hurt something, but the only thing you can hurt without consequence is yourself, then this drive might eventually overpower your drive for pain, and you would hurt yourself as a compromise.
Or, maybe the systems set in place to prevent self-harm do work perfectly fine, and so self-harm only happens when something has happened and those systems aren’t working properly, more like depression. If a malfunction makes it so that bad experiences are estimated as less bad than usual, that would make you pretty reckless — and it could mean that you’re willing to hurt yourself to get the benefits of not hurting yourself later.
It is interesting to note that when certain types of paradoxes are fed to the Kalin-Burkhart machine it goes into an oscillating phase, switching rapidly back and forth from true to false. In a letter to Burkhart in 1947 Kalin described one such example and concluded, “This may be a version of Russell’s paradox. Anyway, it makes a hell of a racket.”
But other times, things do not go so well. The inside of your head is like any palace intrigue: factions rise and fall, allies today are enemies tomorrow, and no one is ever fully in control.
Conflict
When your governors want two incompatible goals to be realized at once, the result is conflict.
Conflict can have different outcomes. When the opposing governors are closely matched in force and there’s a binary decision, it will lead to inaction. When they are closely matched in force and there’s a range of behavior, it will lead to half-measures. When one is much stronger, it can lead to countermeasures.
For example, your hunger governors might vote strongly in favor of eating a piece of cherry pie. But like many people, you have internalized the idea that eating cherry pie is a wicked, weak thing to do. So your shame governor votes strongly against it. The votes cancel each other out. You stand in the window of the bakery for a long time, staring at the pie and doing nothing. Here conflict has led to inaction.
A mouse’s hunger governor will vote to approach a feeding bowl (the mouse is hungry and the bowl is full of food), while its pain governor votes to avoid the feeding bowl (which has been rigged to give the mouse painful electric shocks). If these two governors are about equally strong, the mouse might go half way out towards the bowl of food, and no further. When it gets closer, the fear governor becomes more powerful and pushes it back. When it gets further, the fear governor becomes weaker and the hunger governor pushes it forward. Here conflict has led to an intermediate state, half-measures.
Even when one governor is strong enough to win, there can be ongoing conflict. You pull the cookies out of the cupboard because you’re hungry. Shame makes you throw them in the trash. But once they’re in the trash, hunger is in control again. So you fish the cookies out of the trash. This is conflict where the state is countermeasures.
For a real-world example, here’s Henrik Karlsson describing his own experience of a minor conflict:
Our emotions and intuitions are littered with contradictions.
To take a simple example: when I was at the gallery where I worked until last week, my low blood sugar cravings sometimes told me that it was ok to take a pastry from the café. But when I want to feel like a upright person, I don’t believe in taking stuff that isn’t mine. So which is it? If I follow my gut and eat the pastry, I will be true to myself in the moment, while betraying other versions of me.
The experience of conflict is stress. Staring at the pie and doing nothing is a fairly stressful experience. Hovering between fear and hunger is stressful for the mouse. Throwing out the cookies over and over again is no better.
Unlike the errors generated by your governors, stress is not an emotion. It’s a different kind of experience that happens when two or more actions are in direct competition.
It’s easiest to become stressed when two drives are in direct conflict. You want to ask someone out, but you’re afraid of rejection. You want to eat a whole pizza, but you know your family will laugh at you if you do. Here, two drives hold each other in check, there’s tension.
But you can also become stressed when drives are merely in competition. You might want to both go out and see friends (because you are lonely) and stay in and go to sleep (because you are tired). These are both positive desires, but you can’t do both at once, they are mutually exclusive. If they’re both about equally strong, you will do nothing, neither go out nor sleep, and it will be stressful.
And you can become stressed when negative drives are in competition. A witness to an assault must choose between intervening (risking physical harm) or walking away (risking social condemnation as a coward). Both of these outcomes are things they would like to avoid, but they can’t avoid both. This is also stressful, and again, if they are equally matched the person will do nothing.
Stress is a really negative experience, for two reasons.
First of all, when they’re in conflict, governors are distracted from everything else. They commit all their resources to the fight, and clog up common parts of the system, like the voting channels, with constant bids for their concerns.
Second, governors in conflict are absolutely gunning it. When a governor pushes and the signal doesn’t change, what does it do? That’s right, it pushes harder! If it’s pushing against another governor, then that governor pushes back. They both push ten, twenty, fifty times harder. Soon they are both pushing absolutely as hard as they can.
This is an incredible waste. Whatever resources are involved in this contest will be burned through at an astounding rate, with the only result being a deadlock. But this is what you get when you’re in a double bind. For one governor to correct its error, the other governor must experience an increase in its error. There is no way for both systems to experience zero error at the same time.
This view of stress calls back to old theories like the approach-avoidance conflict, also sometimes called push/pull. Kurt Lewin, who was close with the early cyberneticists, was one of the people who argued for this approach.
“Conflict,” he wrote in his 1935 book, “is defined psychologically as the opposition of approximately equally strong field forces.” Kurt talks in slightly different terms, but the overall conclusion is the same. He offers this example: “The child faces something that has simultaneously both a positive and a negative valence. He wants, for example, to climb a tree, but is afraid.”
Kurt’s views were very influential back in the day, but psychologists don’t really focus on his models anymore. This might be because he insisted on explaining human motivation in terms of “psychical field forces” instead of drives, perhaps in an ill-fated attempt to try to make psychology sound more like physics. In fact, he explicitly rejected drives as “nothing more than the abstract selection of the features common to a group of acts that are of relatively frequent occurrence.”
Lewin’s Galileian Psychology
This model of stress has a surprising implication for self-control. You cannot alter your behavior by simply choosing to overcome the unwanted behavior.
There must be a drive already voting for that behavior, since the behavior exists. It must be controlling something. So to attempt to overcome a behavior can only lead to conflict.
You can avoid situations that would put your governors at odds with each other. You can set one governor against another, suppress your unwanted impulses by the force of shame or fear. All of these defense mechanisms and more will “work”. They will keep you from accidentally doing the unwanted behaviors, at the cost of more conflict. Or they will let you avoid the agony of conflict, at the cost of making your life smaller and smaller. But the only fully healthy solution is to find a way to reorganize things so that both governors can fulfill their purpose without conflict.
William Powers said it best:
The payment for a lifetime of “overcoming” one’s weaknesses, base desires, and forbidden habits is to spend one’s last years in a snarl of conflicts, one’s behavior restricted to that tiny part of the environment that leaves all conflicts quiescent, if any such place still remains. The rigidity of many elderly people is, I believe, the rigidity of almost total conflict, in which every move is made against massive inner resistance.
…
Indeed, self-control is commonly taught as part of raising children … Through social custom and the use of reward and punishment, therefore, we have perpetuated the teaching of self-control and have thus all but guaranteed that essentially everyone will reach adulthood suffering severe inner conflict. Self-control is a mistake because it pits one control system against another, to the detriment of both.
Anxiety
The word “anxiety” is only an abstraction. It groups together many things that seem similar, but may have different causes underneath. (See the prologue to learn more.)
But to take a stab at what all kinds of “anxiety” have in common, we could say that they all look like systems spending a huge amount of energy to make very little progress.
We see two general ways that might happen.
The first is chronic conflict, two or more governors locked in a deadlock for a long time, spending a huge amount of energy fighting each other and getting nowhere.
The second is oscillation, a system wildly swinging back and forth, spending a huge amount of energy correcting and re-correcting, instead of efficiently settling towards a target or equilibrium.
Chronic Conflict
When you’re consistently stressed for a long time, that seems like one kind of anxiety.
Sometimes governors are briefly in deadlock, like gazing at the pie through the window. Eventually you will get cold enough to walk away, or hungry enough to buy the pie, or something will distract you. So this conflict can’t last for very long.
But sometimes governors get locked, not just in conflict in the moment, but habitually in conflict all the time, so that you are constantly stressed. For many people, food is a source not only of stress but also of anxiety, because their feelings of shame will get into conflict with their desire to eat fat and sugar, not just one time, but over and over and over again.
In nature, stress tends to be limited to very brief experiences, where two drives happen to be perfectly balanced. These situations tend to be over pretty quickly. One of the drives will grow faster than the other, or the situation will change, and the conflict is resolved.
However, in a manufactured environment, it’s easy to produce anxiety-inducing situations by accident. For example, a lab animal that only feels safe in a dark tunnel, but whose water bottle has been placed in the brightly-lit center of the cage, will go through repeated experiences of stress as its fear grapples with its thirst. Or a dog that wants to protect its family, but whenever the dog barks at passers-by, the family yells at it. These animals will be anxious, because their drives are habitually in conflict.
Because of our notable collection of social emotions, humans seem to have the worst of this. Social emotions consistently come into conflict with the others. People want to yell at their boss out of anger but don’t want to suffer the social consequences of that outburst. They want to sleep with people they are socially forbidden to sleep with. They are terrified of something but are not able to act on their fear; like a student terrified of their teacher, or a professional driver terrified of getting in a crash. Our social norms around food seem practically designed to be anxiety-inducing; half of the things that a person might naturally be most excited to eat are considered “bad” or outright sinful. That’s a conflict right there.
It’s even possible this is the role social emotions serve in our psychology. Maybe social emotions are there to make us anxious. Humans are still by their nature angry, horny, violent, and so on. But our social emotions put some checks on these drives and may be the only thing that make it possible for us to work together over the long term. Social emotions are frequently called on to keep the other emotions in check, and stress is an unfortunate side-effect of this balance.
Hamlet was stressed because he has to both kill his uncle and not kill his uncle. He is presented over and over again with opportunities to kill or not kill his uncle, or at least to take steps in those directions. But he can’t do either, because the two drives are almost perfectly balanced. This is very stressful.
Antigone was bound to bury her brother Polynices, but Creon had decreed that Polynices was not to be buried or mourned, on pain of death. Orestes avenges his father Agamemnon by killing his mother Clytemnestra, honoring his filial duty to his father but violating his filial duty to his mother. This is the source of tragedy. The ancients had it right.
Let’s see one very interesting example.
When two governors have very similar amounts of votes — let’s say within 10 votes of each other — neither one can win, and you are in a state of conflict.
This causes a little bit of stress. But normally, one or the other of the options will soon get enough votes to beat that margin, or some new issue will come up that renders the decision moot.
However, sometimes for one reason or another, all the vote totals get turned down. This is one of the malfunctions we call “depression”.
This has a curious side-effect. Let’s say that normally you have a hard time deciding between staying at the party and going home. Your loneliness governor has 40 votes for “stay at the party” and your fatigue governor has 45 votes for “go home”.
Since these are within 10 votes of each other, neither can really win. This is uncomfortable and you feel a little stressed. Instead of really engaging, you hover at the edge of the party. But eventually one or the other governor gets a big enough error that it gets enough votes to beat the margin. Probably you get a bit more fatigued, until fatigue hits 51 votes, wins the margin, and you go home.
But when all your errors are turned way down, something strange happens. At the party, you now have fewer votes overall, which makes it harder to break this tie. If errors are turned down to 50%, then you have 20 votes for “stay at the party” instead of 40, and your fatigue governor has 22.5 votes for “go home” instead of 45.
Now to break the tie, your fatigue governor needs 7.5 more votes instead of 5, and each vote requires twice as much of an increase in fatigue. If errors are turned down to 10%, then you have only 4 votes for “stay at the party” and only 4.5 votes for “go home”! You will stay in deadlock for much longer, and it will be stressful the whole time.
Worse than that, you will end up in deadlock more often, over more issues. Normally it is easy to choose to shower (70 votes) before eating breakfast (50 votes). We’re not talking about deciding between the two, just the decision to finish the one before the other.
But if your vote totals are cut, you may find that this decision is suddenly 35 votes versus 25, just barely enough for the vote to resolve. If your votes are cut enough, you won’t be able to decide whether to shower first or eat breakfast first. You become indecisive about all kinds of things, even the smallest decisions.
This may explain why depression so often goes along with anxiety. When your vote totals are turned down, but the margin of votes by which an action has to win remains the same, you end up in a state of deadlock for much longer, and it will happen a lot more often. Since conflict makes you feel stress, you feel stressed all the time, over the kinds of decisions that would be simple or easily resolved before. That’s anxiety.
There are probably many things that can cause anxiety. But any kind of depression that gives you fewer votes overall is going to almost always lead in this unfortunate direction. This also suggests that other forms of depression, that don’t give you fewer votes overall, shouldn’t lead to more conflict and shouldn’t go along with anxiety.
Oscillation
The second way to waste a bunch of energy for no reason is when a system swings back and forth for a long time without settling.
One of the classic ways a control system can fail is that it goes into oscillation, wildly swinging back and forth, wasting a huge amount of energy instead of efficiently settling towards the set point and zero error.
In psychology, this is most obvious in tremors. Damage to the control systems responsible for motor function leads to overshooting and very obvious physical oscillations. In Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener described a few cases:
A patient comes into a neurological clinic. … offer him a cigarette, and he will swing his hand past it in trying to pick it up. This will be followed by an equally futile swing in the other direction, and this by still a third swing back, until his motion becomes nothing but a futile and violent oscillation. Give him a glass of water, and he will empty it in these swings before he is able to bring it to his mouth. What is the matter with him?
… His injury is … in the cerebellum, and he is suffering from what is known as a cerebellar tremor or purpose tremor. It seems likely that the cerebellum has some function of proportioning the muscular response to the proprioceptive input, and if this proportioning is disturbed, a tremor may be one of the results.
This isn’t a problem just with the brain, this is characteristic of all control systems. Weiner notes it as, “… a badly designed thermostat may send the temperature of the house into violent oscillations not unlike the motions of the man suffering from cerebellar tremor.” And in fact, all control systems can oscillate if they become unstable.
Tremors are oscillations in low-level control systems responsible for muscle movements. That’s why you can see them — your arm or leg is actually waving back and forth.
But oscillations might also happen at other levels of control. If systems oscillate at the level of behavior instead of at the level of arm/leg position, that might look like doing behaviors over and over again, or doing them and then undoing them. This would look kind of like compulsions, or like OCD.
If systems oscillate at the highest level, something like thought or intention, that might look like choosing one side of a decision, but then before acting, switching to the other side of the decision. The guy who decides to quit his job, then decides to stay at his job, 20 times per hour. This looks like a form of rumination.
This would kind of explain why OCD and ruminations seem connected. They may be basically the same kind of problem just in slightly different parts of the system. Or maybe OCD is a more extreme form of rumination, an oscillation that makes it all the way into behavior, instead of just oscillating “within thought”.
The difference between oscillations and conflict is that conflict is always a struggle between two or more governors, while oscillation can happen in just one governor alone, especially if it is damaged or otherwise improperly tuned.
Oscillation can happen for a few key reasons.
A governor with too much gain, that makes very aggressive corrections, can overshoot repeatedly instead of settling.
A governor with not enough damping can fail to slow down in time as it corrects its signal towards the target. Then it will overshoot, and have to bring the signal back. But then it may overshoot again.
If there is any delay in feedback, where the governor is getting outdated information, it might keep making adjustments that are no longer needed, leading to overshooting and continuous corrections.
Oscillation is common because control systems often involve a tradeoff between speed and stability. If you want a fast response, you risk instability; if you dampen too much, you risk sluggish behavior.
Without getting too much into the weeds, just like depression can be caused by damage or malfunctions in different parts of your governors and selector, anxiety can be caused by damage or malfunctions in different parts of the ways that your governors are tuned, like their gain or damping, or by similar problems like delay in feedback.
Oscillation can also happen between two governors. It’s easiest to see this with an example. Let’s say that Danny’s hot and cold governors both have a problem where they have too much gain. So when he’s a little bit too cold, he does too much to correct it. He puts on socks and a sweater and gets a hot mug of tea and starts a fire in the fireplace. What happens now? Well, he soon becomes too warm. So he opens the windows and douses the fire and puts a fan on himself and strips down to his underwear. What next? Of course, he gets too cold. So it’s time to get warm again. He will keep oscillating until distracted.
You may even sometimes get oscillation inside a conflict. When two fine-tuned governors want mutually exclusive things, they will usually fight, putting out their more and more effort until they both reach their maximum output, and settle at a midpoint that is the balance between those two maximums.
But if the governors are less well-tuned, they might oscillate. Danny’s fear and status governors are kind of deadlocked at work. He is afraid of his boss but he wants to crack jokes to impress his coworkers. A more “well-adjusted” man would be in a state of conflict. But Danny is poorly tuned. His status governor makes him crack a joke, and his fear governor is too slow to stop it from happening in time. His boss gives him a dirty look and Danny’s fear governor takes over. He shrinks down in his chair. But the fear subsides and soon he thinks of another joke. This is conflict, but it is also oscillation.
Fear of the Future
A final thing we notice is that anxiety is often about the future. This might also be a kind of oscillation.
Consider Molly, a college student. Her parents and her community expect her to be a huge professional success (no pressure, Molly). Her status governor knows that it’s really important that she get a job when she graduates. If she doesn’t, her status governor faces a huge error, and since it can predict this, it wants to prevent it. But she has just started her senior year, so it’s not time to look for a job yet. The best thing she can do is focus on her studies.
This can lead to a weird cycle that looks kind of like a form of oscillation. She starts thinking about having to get a job. Her status governor leaps into action, panics, looks around for a way to start making a difference, but finds that there’s nothing it can do. Then it shuts off. But this can happen 100 times in an afternoon, and there’s not much she can do. There are no steps she can take to get a job now. She just has to wait.
Because the governors are predictive, any promise of an extreme outcome can snipe you in this way. If your fear governor develops a fixation on car accidents, it might sometimes pipe up, “I predict we might get in a car accident. What can we do right now to make that less likely?” But you are in a work meeting, or at the grocery store. There’s nothing you can do at that moment to protect yourself from car crashes. But because the predicted error of a car crash is so huge (possibly death), your fear governor gets huge amounts of control over your attention and motivation when it makes this prediction. So for a while you are cowering in the cereal aisle, running through hypotheticals about dying in a 4-car pileup.
The ability to look at a hot stove, predict that it will burn you, and decide not to touch it, is a great adaptation. It’s why our governors are predictive — it’s great to be able to consider what will happen a few seconds in the future. But the human ability to look very far into the future is more of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it means we can be motivated by things that may not happen for months. We can do long-term planning. But it also means we can be totally captured by far-off imaginary disasters (or imaginary blessings) that totally derail our ability to focus.
You can lie awake in bed asking yourself, “will I be ready for my biology test on Friday?” The best thing to do, of course, would be to go to sleep. But the fatigue governor is being shouted down by the status governor, which is endlessly worried about failing the test. And there’s nothing you can do to make it quiet down. It is 2AM, there’s no way to prevent future status errors now.
Even worse is when you are taking concrete steps towards an outcome but none of your perceptions change. This is probably why founding a startup is so stressful. You work every day on your product, but there’s often no obvious change in your chances of success for weeks or even months. If you can get some metric like “number of users” that is constantly growing, that will help. But if not, you just have to keep plugging away and hope that you really are the next Google, or at least that you will be able to exit.
Or why dating can be so stressful. You can go on apps, go to events, meet people, go on first dates. But most of the actions you take don’t get you any closer to what you are trying to achieve. Each time you either meet the person or you don’t.
This isn’t like most problems! When you are hungry, each apple or corn chip makes you slightly less hungry. When you are afraid, each step aways from the clown makes you slightly less afraid. But when you’re running a small business, most meetings cause no apparent change in your status or safety.
There’s a thermostat that regulates the temperature That might not be reliable That should be disconnected
— Thermostat, They Might Be Giants
Here are some mysteries about depression:
In most illnesses, the list of symptoms is hit or miss. Not every patient gets every symptom, or even every common symptom. If a common symptom of an illness is breaking out in hives, many people will break out in hives, but some people won’t.
Depression is much stranger. Like other diseases, you sometimes get symptoms and sometimes do not. But on top of that, you also sometimes get symptoms, and other times get their opposites.
One common symptom of depression is eating too little. Another common symptom of depression is eating too much.
One common symptom of depression is gaining weight. Another common symptom of depression is losing weight.
One common symptom of depression is insomnia, not being able to sleep. Another common symptom of depression is sleeping too much.
The most typical symptom of depression is feeling really bad. Except in other cases, when the most typical symptom of depression is feeling nothing at all.
There are other weird mysteries when we look at how depression is treated. Even though insomnia itself is a symptom, sleep deprivation often seems to treat depression. (In this context it’s sometimes called Wake Therapy.) This is effective in as many as 50% of cases, though the relief is usually only short-term.
You see symptoms and their opposites because many pairs of emotions cover two ends of a single variable. There’s one set of emotions that make sure you eat enough and another set that make sure you don’t eat too much. Since depression can interfere with either side of the scale, you sometimes get opposite symptoms. We have one set of emotions that make you go to sleep and another set that make you wake up. Since depression can interfere with either, some depressoids have insomnia, and others sleep through their alarm.
Though it’s not usually listed as an official symptom, we would also expect there to be some cases of depression where people end up overheating, and other cases where people end up getting much too cold. Just like for eating and sleeping, there are governors on both ends of the scale, and the governors that would normally take care of these errors are being interfered with.
Symptoms of depression like “loss of interest in sex” don’t have an opposite symptom because while there is a governor making sure that you’re interested in getting a certain amount of sex, there isn’t a corresponding governor making sure you’re not getting too much sex.
Sleep deprivation may be a treatment in some cases because as we’ve previously mentioned, happiness is created by producing and then correcting errors. That means that a very large error created by getting very sleepy might be big enough to register, even when something is wrong with the happiness machinery. If nothing else, it might shake things up enough that something will register.
We also think that close examination shows that depression is not just one disorder, it’s several different disorders. They share a surface-level similarity, but can be clearly divided into types.
The surface-level similarity that all different kinds of “depression” have in common is that they are all disorders where the person very rarely experiences happiness. This is why our culture formed the category “depression”, because we noticed that sometimes people had a persistent lack of happiness, even when they found themselves in situations that should normally make them happy.
But the systems that produce happiness are complex. There are many things that can go wrong, so there are many different kinds of “depression”. And besides the fact that they all present similarly — the person has a hard time experiencing normal happiness — different kinds of depression don’t always have very much else in common.
If we take a look at different ways this model can malfunction, we’ll see different outcomes that all look kind of like depression. But we’ll also notice that despite their basic similarity, most of these different problems have at least slightly different symptoms, so it may sometimes be possible to distinguish them by symptoms alone.
In fact, almost anything that goes wrong in the motivational system will cause something that looks like depression, which is probably why “depression” is so common. Our job is to look past these superficial similarities and try to figure out exactly what is malfunctioning, so we can have some hope of treating it.
Components
If you have two patients with very similar symptoms, you might be tempted to assume they have the same disease. But they might also be experiencing the same symptoms for totally different reasons. For example, a cough could be caused by a viral infection, bacterial infection, or a non-infectious condition like asthma or acid reflux. Or from accidentally inhaling your Dr. Pepper.
You want to give the antibiotics to the person with a cough from a bacterial infection, and the antivirals to the person with a cough from a viral infection, and you don’t want to mix them up. The underlying cause determines the appropriate medical approach, not the symptoms. If you don’t know what’s causing the problem, you can’t treat it.
Imagine you are working on an internal combustion engine. To work correctly, an engine requires both gas and a spark. The battery is fully charged, so you know you have the power needed to create a spark. When you turn the key, the engine turns over, but doesn’t start.
This could be caused by at least two problems. First of all, maybe no gas is getting into the cylinder. Second, maybe the spark plug doesn’t work.
Those sound like two different causes. But they are not, at least not quite. It’s true that we can narrow things down to these two different branches — it almost certainly has something to do with the gas or with the spark plug. But the real causes are much more complicated.
Maybe there’s no gas getting into the cylinder, but “no gas getting into the cylinder” could happen in a number of different ways. First of all, the vent to the gas tank is clogged, creating a vacuum that stops gas from being drawn into the line. Second, there might just not be any gas in the tank. Third, the gas filter could be clogged. Fourth, the gas pump could be broken; for example, there might be a hole in the diaphragm.
The spark plug is also made up of many smaller components. If any component fails, then there’s no spark.
Imagine there are 100 old cars. One misty, rainy morning, you discover that none of them start. This was a real issue back in the day — a big rainstorm one night, and in the morning, half the cars in town stop working.
You figure it must be the spark plug wires, moisture kills ’em. But replacing the spark plug wires only fixes some of the cars. You eventually find out that some of them actually got water in the gas instead, and need a different fix.
Same symptoms (old car doesn’t start), same distal cause (rain storm), but a different proximal cause. So we can have cases with the exact same symptoms (engine turns over but doesn’t start), with two possible diagnoses. And even within those two diagnoses, there are potentially dozens of causes, each requiring a different fix. Even if you figure out for sure that the problem is a lack of gas, you still don’t know if you need to replace the gas filter, or part of the gas pump.
Any system is made up of many smaller parts, all of which can break in several different ways, so you can usually get the exact same disorder as result of issues with different parts. A specific part of the chain is broken, but you can’t tell which one.
Ultimately, examining the symptoms that arise when different systems malfunction will be helpful for treatment. But it’s not law — systems can break for more than one reason. System malfunctions from two different causes may look just the same — from the outside, all you notice is that this system isn’t carrying out its function, but that doesn’t tell you how to fix it.
Malfunction: Too Much Success
Some people have such perfect control over their life that they never meaningfully get hungry, thirsty, tired, lonely, cold, etc. etc.
This sounds good, great even. But in fact the person ends up very depressed, for a simple reason. Nothing is actually wrong with this person, there’s no damage, it’s not even really a malfunction. But the fact that they almost never correct major errors means they very rarely produce any happiness.
This is the depression of the idle rich, which we mentioned before. It can be treated by intentionally creating errors and then correcting them. For example, you might intentionally get very tired and thirsty from running an ultramarathon, and then rest and rehydrate, which will grant nothing short of ecstasy. Or you might expose yourself to pain from some other extreme sport, then recover, and again reap the happiness. People often discover this treatment on their own, which is why the idle rich are often into certain kinds of (no judgment) self-destructive hobbies.
Sleep deprivation therapy seems like it would work pretty well for this kind of depression. It’s the same logic as extreme sports. Staying up all night and then going to sleep would be an almost euphoric experience that would provide you with some happiness, at least for a while.
As a bit of a tangent, something else that may explain some behavior of the rich is that there may be an emotion that drives us not only to maintain our current status, but to increase our status at some constant rate. In other words, there may be a governor whose target is the rate of change, or first derivative, in status.
For someone of normal status, this expresses itself as normal ambition. The average person can always become more important. But as you become higher and higher status, this becomes a problem, because the higher status you are, the harder it is to increase your status further.
Someone who reaches maximum status for their social group finds themselves in a bind. They still feel the drive to increase their status, but they are already top dog. A person might become CEO, or in an earlier age might become King, due to their drive to increase their status. And these people will usually be the ones with the strongest status governors, making their inability to increase their status any further especially painful for them. Those who reach the top are left with a hunger they can no longer feed. “When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer.”
Kings like Alexander often tried to overcome this by establishing their divinity. This approach doesn’t work so well any more, but modern people sometimes handle it by realizing that while they cannot advance their status any further in their own field, they can still advance their status in new areas. This is how Bill Gates ends up advancing his status by becoming a philanthropist, or how Mark Zuckerberg advances his status by training in jiu jitsu. Both of them had already maxed out their status as tech guys, so to keep increasing in status, they had to find new kinds of status in new arenas.
It’s reasonable to ask if this kind of “depression” is actually a problem. Is it so bad to not be very happy, as long as all your needs are met? If you don’t understand what’s going on, you might be concerned that there’s something wrong with you. But if it’s this simple, and it’s just a side effect of all your needs being met, then is there anything to be concerned about?
We think there might be. First of all, while happiness isn’t everything, it’s nice to be happy, and it’s reasonable to think about ways you could be happier.
Second, we suspect that happiness regulates the balance between explore versus exploit. If that’s true, then we would expect that over time, people who are depressed pursue stranger and stranger strategies as they increase their tendency to explore new ideas, in an effort to find something that “works”. But this never brings them happiness, because the problem is internal.
If this is the case, then people who suffer from long-term depression, of any kind, should appear to act crazier and crazier over time, as they explore more and more unusual strategies.
Malfunction: Happiness not Generated
Under normal circumstances, correcting an error creates some amount of happiness. Somewhere in the system is a mechanism that registers when a correction has taken place, and creates a corresponding amount of happiness. The bigger the correction, the more happiness is created.
If something happens to this mechanism — the signal is turned down really low, part of it gets broken, the shipments of neurotransmitters it depends on never arrive — then you get a very characteristic form of depression.
This person experiences emotions as normal, generally behaves as normal, and has successful behavior. After all, their governors are all functioning exactly as normal, errors are getting corrected just like before. They are surviving, even thriving. But despite their successful behavior, they never feel happiness. They appear normal to casual observers, but describe themselves as “dead inside”.
This kind of experience comes out pretty clearly in patient descriptions, like this one reported by William James:
I have not a moment of comfort, and no human sensations. Surrounded by all that can render life happy and agreeable, still to me the faculty of enjoyment and of feeling is wanting — both have become physical impossibilities. In everything, even in the most tender caresses of my children, I find only bitterness. I cover them with kisses, but there is something between their lips and mine; and this horrid something is between me and all the enjoyments of life. My existence is incomplete. The functions and acts of ordinary life, it is true, still remain to me; but in every one of them there is something wanting — to wit, the feeling which is proper to them, and the pleasure which follows them…All this would be a small matter enough, but for its frightful result, which is that of the impossibility of any other kind of feeling and of any sort of enjoyment, although I experience a need and desire of them that render my life an incomprehensible torture.
If happiness is still generated, just at much lower rates than usual, you would get a less extreme version of this experience. Someone who generated 50% as much happiness as usual would feel a little down in the dumps, but not terrible. Someone who generated 10% as much happiness as usual would feel pretty depressed, but not quite entirely dead inside.
This is a good chance to give an example of what we meant when we were talking about how every system is made of many components, how the spark plugs can break in many ways. Even in this very simple model, many different problems will create the same kind of malfunction.
For example, maybe the mechanisms that actually generate happiness are working as intended, but the connections that transmit the correction signal to those mechanisms are malfunctioning. In this case, happiness isn’t generated, because the signal that should trigger happiness never reaches its destination:
Or, maybe the connection is working just fine, but the mechanisms that should generate the happiness are malfunctioning. So the signal arrives just as it should, but nothing is done in response:
While these are malfunctions in different parts of the system, a person with a malfunctioning correction-connection would behave almost exactly the same as a person with a malfunctioning happiness-generator. They would probably benefit from different treatments, since the cause of their depression is different, but they would be very hard to tell apart based on their symptoms.
And of course, this is one of the simplest possible models. In real life, there are more than just two components; there must be dozens.
Malfunction: Errors not Generated
Despite being responsible for different signals, your governors all run on basically the same architecture. If you want to think in terms of mechanical engineering, maybe they all share the same fuel, or the same lubricant, or they’re supplied by the same pump. If you think more in terms of programming, consider them as using many of the same functions, inheriting from the same class, or relying on the same set of libraries.
Since they’re all supplied by the same metaphorical pump, if something goes wrong with that pump, something can go wrong with all of the governors at once. If there’s a function that you use all over your program, and you accidentally comment out an important line in the function, everything that uses that function will be affected. Maybe every part of the program will be impacted the same way, but depending on how the function is used, maybe in different ways.
The most basic job of a governor is to compare the incoming signal to the set point and generate an error. If it does this correctly, its second job is to try to correct that error. But first it has to successfully generate the error.
So if this ability to correctly generate an error ever breaks, that’s a big deal. In a minor malfunction, error signals will still be generated as normal, but all error signals would be turned down, let’s say by 50%. In this case you’ll mostly behave as normal, but you will have to be twice as far out of alignment — get twice as cold, go twice as long without sleeping, etc. — before you take the same amount of action you normally would. And for a given level of actual distress, you will feel only about 50% as tired, hungry, thirsty, lonely, etc.
If this happens to you, you’ll also experience less happiness than normal. Your errors don’t grow as fast as normal, so when you correct your errors, they’ll tend to be unusually small. Eating a meal that would normally correct 10 points of hunger error and create 10 points of happiness will instead correct 5 points of hunger error and create 5 points of happiness. So you’re not joyless at 50% error, but your actions won’t bring the sense of satisfaction that they used to.
Of course, you could wait until you had a subjective experience of 10 hunger before eating a meal. Then you would get the same amount of happiness from correcting it. But if you do that, you will notice that you eat only half as often as usual, and you’ll still ultimately be getting less happiness over the long term, since you are correcting the same magnitude of error, but only half as often. You’ll also notice that you feel weak and brainfoggy, since you are only getting about half of your actual nutritional needs.
However, lots of people eat more by routine than by hunger. So most people would probably stick to their three-meals-a-day approach, through the normal drumbeat of social routine, or just out of habit. These people will eat as much as normal, but get half as much satisfaction.
If something more serious goes wrong, and all error signals are turned down to 10% instead, your motivation would become extremely sluggish, and you will generate much less happiness than usual. It will take you a lot longer to take action than it would otherwise, because it takes much longer for your error to reach a given level. This might be called procrastination.
Let’s simplify and say that hunger is driven entirely by blood sugar (not true, but this is for the sake of example). For a person whose error signals are turned down to 10%, their blood sugar will slowly drop lower and lower without causing an appreciable error. Without any error, it’s hard for them to have any motivation to eat, let alone cook.
Eventually blood sugar gets very low and the governor is finally generating the minimum amount of error needed to get over the gate’s threshold. This person still won’t be very motivated, and the hunger still won’t be very pressing. And if they do eat, it won’t make them very happy, because the correction is quite small. This person is trapped in a world of low motivation, very dulled emotions, difficulty telling whether they are hungry / thirsty / tired / etc., and little happiness.
In the extreme case, if your error-generating systems are so busted that almost all your errors are close to zero no matter how far out of alignment you are, things get pretty bad. This person barely experiences emotions, so almost no behavior happens. This is classic “can’t get out of bed” or “bedrot” depression — the person has hygiene problems and only eats, sleeps, or moves when extremely hungry/tired/etc. Since their error signals never get very big, there’s no opportunity to correct them, and this person experiences almost no happiness.
If errors actually become zero, the person is effectively immobile, in a sense almost comatose or paralyzed. This lines up pretty well with the symptoms of having a serious basal ganglia injury. Consider this case report from Treating Organic Abulia with Bromocriptine and Lisuride: Four Case Studies:
During the preceding three years he had become increasingly withdrawn and unspontaneous. In the month before admission he had deteriorated to the point where he was doubly incontinent, answered only yes or no questions, and would sit or stand unmoving if not prompted. He only ate with prompting, and would sometimes continue putting spoon to mouth, sometimes for as long as two minutes after his plate was empty. Similarly, he would flush the toilet repeatedly until asked to stop.
Antipsychotic drugs like haloperidol seem like they might be messing with the same system. If you take too much haloperidol, you’ll sit there and do nothing, possibly until you die.
Malfunction: Errors Generated Too Much
Earlier we used the analogy of a pump being damaged and working at only 50% capacity. The pump can also be damaged in a way that sends it into overdrive, where it careens along at 200% capacity.
If this happens, all your errors are twice as large as normal. You are more driven, and driven to do more things. You become wildly active. Since your errors are larger, correcting them makes you even happier. The most normal successes, like drinking a glass of water, create almost ecstatic happiness, and your mood soon goes off the charts. This sounds a lot like the high phases of manic depression / bipolar disorder.
The real question here is why manic depression is so common, but pure mania — mania just by itself — is so rare. People are pure depressed all the time, many people are bipolar, so why aren’t many people suffering from pure mania?
We certainly don’t know, but here are some rough hypotheses.
One very mechanical answer is that overdrive is simply unsustainable. A person can’t be manic all the time, because eventually they will run out of juice.
Consider that example with the pump. In this case, the pump that supplies all the different engines has malfunctioned and is running at 200%. The pump circulates oil drawn from a reservoir. Normally this reservoir re-fills with oil (perhaps as it’s filtered, or drawn from a larger reservoir) faster than the pump circulates it. But when the pump is rushing along at 200%, it drains the reservoir faster than it can be filled. So it empties the reservoir and triggers some kind of emergency stop, during which it can draw no oil at all. Eventually the reservoir refills and the stop is lifted, and the pump goes back into overdrive mode again.
In this explanation, bipolar disorder *is* pure mania. During your manic phases you overuse some kind of limited resource. When it runs out, you’re cast into the depressive phase caused by the lack of that resource. This lasts until the resource has built up back to some minimum level, at which point you start running at 200% again. But the real nature of the problem is disguised, because the human nervous system has checks and limits.
(A quick research check suggests that in bipolar disorder, manic phases last only days or weeks, while depressive phases last months. That’s a pretty interesting pattern, why aren’t they more symmetrical? Perhaps it is because the limited resource takes longer to regenerate than it does for the manic phase to burn through it.)
Another possibility is that bipolar disorder isn’t a malfunction in our motivational system, it’s a disorder in some other system that’s connected to motivation. Think about the circadian rhythm. This is a system that, roughly speaking, drives us to be active during the day and sleep during the night. If something were to happen to our circadian rhythm — if the daytime highs were dizzyingly high and the nighttime lows were crushingly low, if the cycle were an awkward 108 hours long instead of a nice 24 hours long — that might also look a lot like bipolar disorder.
Malfunction: Errors Reduced in Other Ways
One thing we’d like to explain is why you get the weird pattern of opposite symptoms in depression, where (for example) one person eats too much and another person eats too little. Most diseases don’t cause their own opposite symptoms.
This problem seems like it has something to do with the balance between governors that come in pairs and watch two ends of the same variable. In the undereating/overeating example, that would be the balance between the hunger governor (“make sure to eat enough”) and the satiety governor (“but don’t eat too much!”).
But if you turn down the errors on both of these governors equally, they should remain in perfect balance. So turning down all governors by a flat amount shouldn’t cause this kind of symptom, we shouldn’t see this weird pattern.
No actual problem is ever so clean. Let’s go back to our pump metaphor. We can say things like “everything is turned down by 40%”, but in practice if 10 different motors are all supplied with lubricant from the same pump, and that pump gets jammed and starts working at only 40% capacity, some of the motors will be worse off than others. Motors that are further away from the pump, and have longer tubes, will probably be worse off. Motors close to the pump will be better off. Some of the closer motors might even keep functioning as normal. At 40% capacity, clogs may form in the lines, but they will form in some lines and not in others.
The point is, in any kind of real nuts-and-bolts system, a 40% loss of capacity won’t lead to a performance drop of exactly 40% in all parts. Some parts will be more affected than others. So even if you take a general hit to something that supplies all your governors, it might still affect your hunger governor more than your satiety governor, leading you to undereat. It might sometimes turn governors down and other times turn them up, leading to either insomnia or sleeping too much.
But there are other ways to get this pattern too.
First of all, this could have something to do with the weights on the governors, what we think of as personality. We’ve been assuming that any change will be a percent of the original signal (if the original signal was 10, and there’s a flat reduction to 30%, the new signal will be 3), but if every governor is cut down by a flat amount instead, then the balance between the governors will end up somewhat different than it was before.
Let’s say two people have a malfunction with their error-generation systems, but instead of reducing all errors by 50%, this malfunction reduces the weights on all their governors by 0.6 across the board.
One guy has a starting hunger weight of 1.3 and a starting satiety weight of 0.8. After being reduced by 0.6, his new hunger weight is 0.7 and his new satiety weight is only 0.2. His drive to eat was always a bit more powerful than his drive to stop eating. But the relative strength of this relationship has changed enormously. Now, his satiety governor is barely active at all. He is definitely at risk of eating too much, the satiety signals just don’t come through like they are supposed to. So this guy gets one pattern of symptoms: overeating.
The other guy is the exact opposite, a starting hunger weight of 0.8 and a starting satiety weight of 1.3. After depression, his new hunger weight is 0.2 and his new satiety weight is 0.7. His drive to eat was never very powerful, but now it’s almost nonexistent. He will definitely end up with a different symptom: not eating enough. The hunger signals just don’t come through like they are supposed to.
If this is one way to become depressed, then the symptoms of this kind of depression, especially the asymmetric symptoms, will tend to be more extreme versions of someone’s normal personality traits. When they become depressed, someone who has always had some trouble falling asleep will get the symptom of insomnia — while someone who has always had some trouble waking up will get the symptom of oversleeping.
Finally, we’d like to note that everything in the world is at least a little bit random. If you have a general problem with the cybernetic governors in your brain, odds are that some of them will be more affected than others, for no particular reason.
For people with this kind of malfunction, since some of their emotions are functioning correctly, they can still sometimes correct their errors. When only some governors are affected, you will experience some happiness, though usually less than before, so this is often hard to diagnose as depression. If one governor is particularly knocked out, then it may be diagnosed as something else — like if your sleep governor is particularly suppressed, it might be diagnosed as insomnia.
Malfunctions in Voting and Gating
There’s some set of mechanisms that generate, transmit, and assign votes. Like anything else, these can break or get jammed.
Any malfunction that makes a person get fewer votes than normal will lead them to take less action. Any malfunction that makes someone get almost no votes will lead them to take almost no actions. This is basically the same as the malfunctions in error generation described above: the person will take fewer actions and generate less happiness than usual when they do.
A particularly interesting part of the selector is the gate. Remember that the gate has a threshold for a minimum amount of votes, and it suppresses votes for actions below this total to keep us from dithering or wasting resources. To use some arbitrary numbers for the sake of illustration, the gate might have a threshold of 5, meaning that when an action gets 5 votes or less, the gate clips that to zero, and the action gets effectively no support at all.
Any malfunction that raises someone’s gate threshold a bit will lead them to take fewer actions, because actions that would normally pass the threshold will no longer be able to clear it. Any malfunction that raises someone’s gate threshold a lot will lead them to take almost no actions, once the threshold is so high that almost no action can afford it.
Since action is needed to correct most of your errors, and correcting your errors is the source of happiness, if one of these malfunctions happens in your head, you will get less happy. Again, this looks like depression.
On the other hand, malfunctions that lower your gate threshold, so that actions can be performed even when they don’t get very many votes, will lead you to take more actions. In particular, you will have more of a bias towards action, because any small discomfort will more easily translate into doing something about it.
Malfunctions in these systems are a little hard to talk about, because they cause very similar behavior as the malfunctions in generating errors, described just above. In both cases, people will take less and less action, becoming sad and unmotivated. So they will be very hard to tell apart.
The most likely difference is subjective. When the mechanisms that generate errors are malfunctioning, you get weaker errors, or no errors at all. Since errors are emotions, these people feel no emotions — no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no loneliness, etc.
But with malfunctions in voting or in the gate, emotions / error signals are being generated as normal. It’s just that the governor never gets the votes it needs to correct them, or the votes can’t get through. These people experience all their emotions just as strong as ever, but cannot take action to correct them.
If the malfunction is severe enough, this would present a lot like bedrot — the person can’t get out of bed, they barely eat or sleep, etc. But subjectively it is very different. With bedrot caused by a malfunction where your governors can’t generate their normal error signals, you don’t do anything, but you also don’t feel anything. With bedrot caused by a malfunction in voting or gating, you still feel hungry, tired, thirsty, gross, etc. as much as ever, but you’re trapped and cannot bring yourself to take even the smallest action to help yourself.
Malfunctions in Pricing
A governor needs to be able to act on the world to succeed, but it also needs to be able to recognize success when success arrives. If you succeed and you don’t remember it, then you can’t benefit from the experience. So any kind of malfunction in the learning process can make behavior get very strange.
Consider what would happen if each experience were only recorded as a fraction of its true value. You go out with friends and find that this reduces loneliness by 10 points. But through some strange error, it is experienced or recorded as reducing loneliness by only 1 point. This gives you a very skewed view of whether or not you should go out with friends, when you are trying to decide what to do in the future.
If this happens across the board, then every action will gradually but consistently get underestimated. Over time, your governors learn to estimate all behaviors as being only 10% as effective as they really are.
This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that all actions have costs. Forget about going out in the cold to see friends. It used to be 5 points of effort to drive to the bar, plus one point because the cold governor is always voting against it, but seeing your friends reduces loneliness by 10 points, so it was worth net 4 points on average. But now that “seeing friends” is estimated at only 1 point, it’s no longer calculated to be worth it! This guy will sit at home and feel bad, wanting to do something, but feeling like nothing is worth the effort.
In this kind of depression, you mistakenly believe that no action is worth the effort it would take, so you end up sad, because you choose not to do anything. This choice makes a certain internal sense — according to your best recordkeeping, choosing to do things isn’t worth it. From an outside perspective we know what is happening — your recordkeeping is all wrong! But it’s not obvious from the inside.
If you did take those actions, you would find that they create happiness as normal. Nothing is wrong with your ability to experience things. But you still wouldn’t learn from that experience, because there is something wrong with your memory.
Other malfunctions in the machinery of learning and memory would have similar effects. For example, if values were stored properly (“let’s write this down, eating a burger makes me 50 points less hungry”) but retrieved improperly (“hmmm, according to my notes a burger only corrects 5 points”), the effect would be almost the same.
Recap
Happiness is generated when one of your governors corrects an error, and the bigger the correction, the more happiness.
If you are too successful at keeping your errors in check, then the corrections you make will always be very small, so you will be generating very little happiness. This looks kind of like depression.
If something goes wrong with the mechanisms that generate happiness, then your governors will keep generating their errors and will keep correcting them, but these corrections will not create any happiness. This looks like depression.
If something goes wrong with your governors’ ability to generate their errors, so that all their errors are smaller than normal, then you will be more lethargic, have blunted emotions, and when these errors are corrected, the correction will create less happiness. This looks like depression.
If something goes wrong so that sometimes governors generate smaller errors and sometimes generate larger errors, then you will go through periods of intense activity with huge amounts of happiness, and periods of serious lethargy with almost no happiness to speak of. This looks like manic depression.
If something goes wrong with the systems that handle turning the errors into votes, counting the votes, weighing the vote totals, etc., then you will still feel those errors as normal emotions, but you will not be able to successfully take the actions needed to correct those errors. This looks like depression.
If something goes wrong with the systems that keep track of the effects of your actions, that learn or remember these values, so that all actions are remembered as less valuable than they really are, then bad things stop seeming as bad, good things stop seeming as good, and nothing seems worth doing relative to the cost of the effort required to do it, so you don’t do much at all. This looks like depression.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 