self-control

The Mind in the Wheel – Part III: Personality and Individual Differences

slimemoldtimemold, , , , , , , 5 Comments

[PROLOGUE – EVERYBODY WANTS A ROCK]
[PART I – THERMOSTAT]
[PART II – MOTIVATION]

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

—John Stuart Mill

The cybernetic paradigm gives you a theory of personality for free.

There are lots of governors in your mind, and some governors are stronger than others. Other things being equal, a stronger governor has more influence over your actions than a weaker governor. It gets more votes and has more of a say when it comes time for your governors to decide what to do. 

Someone with an unusually strong hunger governor will seek out food sooner and will spend more effort to get it than someone with an especially weak hunger governor. 

Someone with an especially strong status governor will be especially sensitive to changes in their status, and will invest lots of time and effort into status games. Someone with an especially weak status governor will appear almost blind to status, and it will hardly ever influence their behavior.

This provides the cybernetic paradigm’s theory of personality. People differ in many ways, but a particularly important way they can differ is in the strength of each of their different governors/emotions. In the cybernetic paradigm, differences between people are differences between parameters like the setpoints, strength, and sensitivity of their different governors. 

To say that one person is more extraverted than another is to say either that their setpoint for social interaction is higher, that they defend the setpoint more aggressively, or that they’re more sensitive to disturbances away from that setpoint. To say that someone is brazen is to suggest that their shame governor is weaker than normal. To say that they are humble says something about the governor that pays attention to status. 

Let’s break this down a little further.

First: People can have different setpoints for the same governor. We don’t know what units danger is measured in, but if one person has a danger set point of 5 units and another person has a danger set point of 10 units, the first person will keep themselves much safer than the second person. They will avoid situations where they feel that danger is above 5 units, while the other person won’t be sensitive, won’t feel any fear, until the danger is much higher. 

That said, we actually don’t think that most personality differences are differences in setpoints, because the setpoints we know about are pretty similar across different people. Most people defend very similar setpoints for body temperature (about 98.6 °F), very similar setpoints for plasma osmolality (about 280 mOsm/L), very similar setpoints for serum potassium (about 4 mmol/L). 

But there are certainly some exceptions. People can defend very different body weights, making some people extremely lean and others extremely obese. And set points can change, so they’re sometimes different even within one person. A fever is a short-term change in the body temperature set point(s). Obesity is a long-term change in the body weight set point(s).

Finally, even if people do defend very similar setpoints across the board, there will always be small differences between their setpoints, which will lead to some differences in personality. 

Second: People’s governors can be stronger or weaker when it comes time to negotiate with other governors. When two governors disagree, which one wins? 

Mark’s anger governor is especially strong, and gets many more votes than the other governors. So when anger goes up against anything else, it almost always wins. Mark has anger-control issues. 

Julie’s fatigue governor is especially weak, and gets many fewer votes than the other governors. So when fatigue goes up against anything else, it almost always loses. Julie often stays up until she is very tired, doing all sorts of activities until she practically collapses. She barely seems aware that she’s tired. Even when she lies down, she often has a very hard time falling asleep. If there’s anything else she has in mind, her fatigue is not strong enough to keep her from thinking of it, then getting up and doing it.

You can describe this in terms of each governor having a different weight, with a weight of 1 meaning average strength. If one of your governors has a weight of 1, then that drive is as strong for you as it is for the average person. Weights above 1 mean the governor is stronger than normal; weights below 1 mean it’s weaker. 

If you are born with the weight on your fear governor set to 2, your experience of fear is twice as powerful as normal, it has something like twice the influence over your actions. This makes you very cowardly, since your fear becomes overpowering in situations that other people would find mildly concerning. After all, it has twice as many votes as usual! 

If you are born with the weight on your fear governor set to 0.5, your experience of fear is half as powerful as normal, it gets half as many votes as it would normally. This makes you very brave. In situations that other people would find terrifying, your fear barely has enough votes to call a motion.

Third: People’s governors can be more or less sensitive to disturbances. By analogy, a thermostat might have a narrow or a wide acceptable range around the target temperature. Strict sensitivity would mean frequent corrections as soon as the temperature drifted even 0.1 °F away from the set point, while a looser control system would allow more drift before it reacts, with control not kicking in until it was 2-3 °F off target. 

This is a natural tradeoff. Strict/aggressive control means you spend more energy, reacting even to small changes and adjusting constantly, but it also means you stay very close to the set point. Loose/sluggish control means you spend more time out of alignment but you also save a lot of energy on not making all these neurotic adjustments. Some things really do need to be kept right at the set point, but other things can be allowed to wander a bit. 

We think these three kinds of differences are probably important. But just to show that this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are two more ways that people’s governors might be different. 

For example, an important parameter in control systems is gain. A sluggish system applies weak corrections (low gain), meaning it takes longer to reach the target. An aggressive system cranks up corrections harder (high gain), leading to faster changes, but possibly overshooting. 

So some governors respond to an error with a big correction all at once, while other governors respond to an error of the same size with many small, incremental corrections. This might look like a personality difference of overreacting or underreacting.

This isn’t the same as sensitivity to disturbances. For example, Julie has a cleanliness governor with low sensitivity and high gain. She lets her apartment get pretty dirty (because of the low sensitivity), but once it’s a certain level of mess, she cleans it all at once, back to a high level of cleanliness (high gain). 

Mark also has a cleanliness governor with low sensitivity, but his has low gain. He also lets his apartment get pretty dirty (because of the low sensitivity), but once it’s a certain level of mess, he slowly cleans it bit by bit until it doesn’t bother him anymore (low gain).

A related idea is damping. Some thermostats have a built-in “wait time” after making a correction, which helps prevent the temperature from swinging wildly. If our governors have some kind of damping, this might also vary between people. 

With a fear governor set to low damping, you would respond very quickly to danger, but might sometimes freak out over nothing. It might even look like an extreme flinch response. With a fear governor set to high damping, you would respond very slowly and deliberately to new threats — good in some situations, but very bad in others!

All these parameters can combine in some interesting ways. Consider two people who have unusual sugar-governors, but unusual in different ways. Alice has a normal sugar setpoint, but her sugar-governor is unusually strong. Bob has a normal weight on his sugar-governor, but an unusually high sugar setpoint.

Alice’s sugar-governor gets more votes than other people’s. Since it tends to have the votes it needs, from the outside this looks like making sweet foods a priority. She always eats her sweets first. But if you kept a close measure of how much sugar she’s eating, you’d see that it’s actually the same amount as the average person, because her set point is the same.

Bob’s sugar-governor gets the normal amount of votes, but aims for a higher setpoint. For a given level of desire, Bob doesn’t prioritize sugar more than other people. But if you keep track over the long term, he does consume more sugar to reach that higher set point. 

The upshot is that there are at least as many personality dimensions as there are emotions, and each of these personality dimensions are linked to the “settings” of a particular emotion. 

Mere Words

As of this writing, the most widely accepted theory of personality is the “Big Five” personality traits.

This theory comes from statistical analysis. When you have people rate themselves and others on a wide variety of adjectives, and then apply various statistical techniques, you usually end up with five clusters of adjectives. Over time people settled on a set of labels for those clusters: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

It’s not hard to see how these might map on to various emotions. For example, extraversion is probably a rough measure of the strength of various social emotions.

But the Big Five has some problems as a theory. The first one is fundamental — the Big Five are an abstraction, not a model. We all have a casual sense of what it means to be neurotic, we know what kind of superficial behavior to expect from someone described with this word, but the theory doesn’t say anything about the mechanisms that cause someone to behave in a neurotic way. It caps out at being able to record that one measure is correlated with another measure. It can neither explain, nor in any meaningful way can it predict. (For more about these problems, see The Prologue.)

Rather short of a wiring diagram

In addition, the method psychologists used to come up with these five factors is limited. 

The Big Five were discovered through a method called factor analysis, a statistical approach that searches for clusters of correlated variables and hypothesizes factors that might account for the patterns it finds. Psychologists collected large sets of descriptive adjectives like “friendly” and “bashful” and had people rate how well the adjectives applied to themselves or others. Then they used factor analysis to estimate how these ratings co-occurred. This usually gave a solution of five factors — five clusters of adjectives that tended to be highly correlated within the clusters.

But language doesn’t capture all of the true personality differences, or at least doesn’t capture all of them to the same degree.

There are some terms, like “salt tooth” and “sweet tooth”, which hint at recognition of the fact that in some people the salt-hunger governor is unusually strong, and in other people the sugar-hunger governor is unusually strong. But these terms aren’t as much a part of our language as dimensions like “does this person spend lots of time around other people” or “is this person reliable”, which come out into the factors of “extraversion” and “conscientiousness”.

This is for social-historical reasons — at the moment, our culture cares a lot about communicating whether or not a person is sociable and/or reliable, and cares very little about their preferences for sweet or salty foods. Compare this to how Ancient Greek and Latin both had lots of different words for different kinds of shields. In their culture, the kind of shield you used said a lot about where you fit in society, so they had terms to make these distinctions. But in our culture no one cares what kind of shield you use, so modern English does not. 

Different times and cultures will have different priorities, and will want sets of words that help them describe variation in the drives they care about the most. There’s still variation in the drives they don’t care about as much, but since they don’t care about that variation, they won’t talk about it, so they won’t need any words for it. 

The fear governor is real, and martial cultures of the past had many ways to talk about differences in how someone responds to fear. How you responded to fear was very relevant in these cultures, it came up a lot. But today we are safe most of the time and these differences rarely matter, so the words we’ve inherited from such times, like brave and cowardly, are too few to pull their own group in a factor analysis. (You could get more by adding archaic terms like dauntless, plucky, valiant, doughty, aweless, and orped, but these probably don’t go in the surveys.)

The Icelandic language, on the other hand, which has changed much less than English over the centuries, still retains several words for these concepts — huglaus, óframur, ragur, blauður, deigur, all these mean something like “fearful” or “cowardly”. And on the opposite side, Icelandic has about a dozen words for “brave”. 

But even though English doesn’t give them dozens of adjectives apiece, emotions like cold, tiredness, needing to pee, etc. all have personality dimensions just the same. Some people are driven more by the need to keep warm, and some barely notice the cold. Some people are driven by their bed. For some people, when nature calls, you must answer. 

The seven deadly sins are a bit judgy as a personality measure, but they had it a little better. Gluttony and sloth are clearly ways to talk about individual differences in things like hunger and tiredness. And lust is, if anything, one of the most notable personality dimensions. How could you possibly explain Aella’s personality without mentioning that she is much, much hornier than average? On the opposite side, having a weight on this governor near zero would lead to asexuality, so being asexual should also be understood as part of personality.

Individual Differences

There are also some differences that are not linked to the emotions and drives, that don’t reflect the settings on different governors.

For example, people can also be different in the parameters of motivation we described in Part II; like the gate threshold, i.e. the minimum number of votes to make an action happen. If you have a higher gate threshold, you are more likely to just sit there and less likely to do anything, every action needs a larger number of votes just to activate. If you have a lower gate threshold, you are constantly jumping around, every time an action gets any votes, you do it. Similarly, to say that someone is decisive is to imply something about the parameters of their selector, not their governors.

One underrated individual difference is being a night owl versus being a morning lark (sometimes called your chronotype). The dimension is related to sleep, but doesn’t seem like a parameter of the drive for sleep (probably?). Instead it’s a tendency or preference for when sleep will occur. 

Some people are certainly more curious than others. But curiosity may not be an emotion, because it doesn’t seem to be satisfying a drive to send a signal to some specific target. 

Another difference is taste preference. Certainly some tastes, like those for salt or fat, are nutritive, necessary for survival, and therefore probably controlled by a governor. But some taste preferences may not come from the drives, they may just be variation. Chunky and creamy peanut butter have almost exactly the same nutritional profile, but some people prefer one to the other. The same goes for preferences for smells — there is probably not a lavender-smell governor, but some people still like the smell of lavender more than others. 

If these preferences really are preferences, and aren’t attached to drives, we’ll be able to tell because they will not be exhausted like drives are. Even someone who likes salt very much will eventually eat enough salty food and will stop eating it for a while. Their salt drive will send its error signal to zero and then be satisfied. But someone who likes the smell of lavender shouldn’t get satisfied by it in the same way, their preference should be mostly constant. 

The reason for these differences is the same as for any kind of differences: diversity. It’s not just random chance; it is by design, because: bees.

How do the bees decide how many of them should be fanning? … There’s no communication, but as the ventilation gets worse in the hive, more and more bees start fanning their wings. How would you design bees to solve this problem? You don’t want every bee fanning their wings 24/7 or they’re wasting time, but a nice ratio of ‘bees fanning’ to ‘bees not fanning’ that adapts in order to hit your ventilation criteria.

When Huber examined the fanning problem, he came up with an elegant theory. He suggested that bees are differentially sensitive to noxious smells. So as the noxious smells get worse, the sensitivity threshold of more and more bees is reached, and more of them begin fanning until ultimately the entire hive is fanning.

If everyone in your village has the same set point for danger, then as danger increases, for a long time no one takes any precautions, and then at some point everyone flips over and starts fortifying the town all at once. This is kind of a nuts way to do things.

It’s better to have some diversity. If there’s only a little danger, a small number of villagers are stockpiling food and reinforcing the town walls. As the danger increases, more and more villagers attend to the safety of the town. This is actually its own form of control system.  

The same thing goes for preferences. If everyone in your band of hunter-gatherers falls asleep exactly at dusk and rises at dawn, then you are all defenseless at the same time. But if some of you are morning larks and some of you are night owls, then someone is always awake to tend the fire and watch for saber-toothed tigers.

Now apply the same reasoning to taste and smell. If everyone in your town has identical tastes, then they will all eat pretty much the same food; if that food becomes rotten, everyone gets sick at once. Better to have variation in food preferences so you’re eating different things. Then if some food goes bad, only some of you get sick. Avoid a single point of failure.

To sum up, differences in the strength of different governors are a major part of personality, though not the only part. There are also various other individual differences, including simple preferences.

Sex Differences

Academic psychologists claim they can’t find any clear mental differences between the sexes (mostly; for the nuanced version of things, see here). But here’s one: the huge and obvious differences in the desire to play certain kinds of video games. 

About half of gamers are women. But a few genres are overwhelmingly played by men. In particular, men are much more interested in tactical shooters like ARMA 3, and in grand strategy paint-the-map games like Europa Universalis. These games are about violent competition and domination, so this pattern may point to the existence of something like a “need to dominate” emotion.

Looking closer, the experience of shooters and strategy games are quite different, suggesting that there might actually be two separate dominance-related emotions that tend to be much stronger in men than in women. Let’s consider these drives one at a time.

The experience of a tactical shooter is shooting people in the head; it’s about as close as you can get these days to crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women. You may be wondering whether people really have a drive for such a thing, especially if you don’t play tactical shooters. But there’s good evidence that many people do. As one example, the subreddit r/CombatFootage (TAKE CARE IN CLICKING, CONTAINS DISTURBING COMBAT FOOTAGE) has 1.7 million members. Top videos on the subreddit get thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. For comparison, r/vegan also has 1.7 million members. Some people really want to see this stuff.

In contrast, grand strategy games are abstract and bloodless, lovingly referred to as spreadsheet simulators. These don’t seem like they could be about personal, physical domination, since they don’t even simulate that. But they’re not pacifistic — they do a very good job simulating the experience of forcing other societies to make concessions, become your vassals, and so on. 

Between the two genres, there’s plausibly one dominance emotion about personally thrashing your enemies, and another dominance emotion about being in charge of organizing the logistics of thrashing — something like social domination, or having your group dominate other groups.

Paradox games!

We see something similar in the list of words known better by males than by females, and vice versa. Men are much more likely to know words like howitzer, katana, and bushido (not just military terms, but historical military terms) while women are much more likely to know words like peplum, chignon, and damask (fabric and hairdressing terms). The authors of this paper characterize the result as, “gender differences in interests (games, weapons, and technical matters for males; food, clothing, and flowers for females)”.

even more spreadsheets

The list suggests that on average men tend to have stronger dominance emotions and women tend to have stronger decorative emotions, or perhaps hygienic emotions (in the sense that being properly dressed is hygiene). 

We are of course talking about average differences. There are plenty of women with strong dominance emotions, and plenty of men with strong decorative emotions. (And women may in fact have higher tuning on a different set of dominance emotions.) But on average there seems to be some difference.

We don’t care about the cause — differences could be the result of socialization, of nature, or both. Or something else. But there do seem to be average personality differences between the sexes, which make perfect sense when you think of personality as differences in the strength of different governors. 

It’s also worth considering if sex differences we think of as physiological might actually be psychological. Women typically feel colder than men — this might be biological, something to do with their body size or metabolic rate. But it could also be psychological, something to do with the set point or strength of their cold governor.

Psychiatry

Like most biological attributes, the strength of our governors probably falls on a normal distribution. The majority of people will have a fairly usual weight on each governor. But in rare cases, weights will be set incredibly high or incredibly low.

Since we have no idea what the units are for “strength of a governor”, as before we will just say that 1 is the population average. Having a weight of 0.5 on a drive means it is half the strength of the population average, and having a weight of 2 on a drive means it is twice the strength of the population average.

If you set the weight on a governor to 0, we call this a “knockout”. It’s functionally equivalent to not having that drive at all, because when the weight on a governor is 0, the governor gets no votes. 

For example, take Alex Honnold, sometimes called “the World’s Greatest Solo Climber”. Alex enjoys climbing sheer cliffs without a rope, an experience so terrifying that many people can’t even stand to watch the videos. When neuroscientists put Honnold through an fMRI and showed him terrifying and gruesome pictures, they found that his brain is intact — he does have an amygdala — but he has almost no fear response. 

Whatever the exact biological issue might be — whether he was born that way, or if he’s somehow turned down the fear governor through training and exposure — Honnold appears to be someone with a fear knockout. The weight on his fear governor is set very close to zero. 

In cybernetic psychology, a lot of psychiatric conditions look, in a literal sense, like personality disorders. Personality is largely made up of differences in the weights on a person’s various governors. Personality disorders occur when some of those weights are not merely different, but set extremely low or extremely high. 

Consider fear. Most people are somewhat concerned about things some of the time. They have a weight on their fear governor around 1. If you set the weight on “fear” to 10, they will instead be very concerned about things lots of the time. That looks a lot like paranoia. 

This is a good spot to point out that a cybernetic system has multiple parts and can be broken in many ways. Let’s take the fear governor as an example. 

You can break the input function, so it perceives danger as being higher than it otherwise would. This will cause paranoia. You can change the fear governor’s set point to a very low level of danger, so it reacts to even very small amounts of danger. This will cause paranoia. You can damage the output function, so that it thinks that large interventions are appropriate for small amounts of danger. This will cause paranoia. Or you can change how many votes the fear governor gets in the parliament of the mind. Again, this will cause paranoia. 

These changes may present slightly differently, but notice how even though these are four different problems with the fear governor, you end up seeing basically the same behavior in every case. Among other things, this makes diagnosis and treatment quite tricky. You have at least four disorders, with categorically different causes, yet nearly identical presentation. 

This also offers a plausible model for conditions like autism and psychopathy. Both appear to be congenital abnormalities in various emotions — conditions that happen when you are born with a couple of your emotions unusually strong or weak.

“Autism” seems to be a label that we apply to people who have very low weights, or complete knockouts, on some of their social emotions. 

“Psychopathy” seems to be a label that we apply to people who have very low weights or knockouts on a different set of social emotions, especially when combined with high weights on emotions like anger or need for dominance. 

As you can tell from our hedging, we suspect these categories are poorly-formed. There probably isn’t “a disorder” that can be identified with autism. It’s just a word, an abstraction that we use to refer to various personality types that are similar in the sense that they have low weights on certain social emotions. (See the Prologue for more on this.)

Autism and psychopathy are often framed as deficiencies, but you can also see them as deficiencies in some things combined with superabundances in other things. 

We tend to call people “psychopaths” not when they merely lack in fear or compassion, but when a lack of fear or compassion are combined with unusually strong drives for status and dominance.

People tend to be considered autistic not when they merely lack a drive for status, but when this is combined with unusually strong interest in social rules and an unusually strong drive for compassion. People get confused about this. You often hear things like, “people who are autistic don’t understand social conventions”. But actual people who are autistic seem to believe things like, “if you eat a non-prime number of chicken nuggets you’re breaking the rules”.

It’s not clear if these are specific “disorders”, or just the extremes of normal personality variation. Some people have stronger social emotions than others. When the weights on your social emotions are 0.7, nobody cares, you just seem kind of introverted. But when some of your weights are 0.5 or lower, maybe they start calling you autistic.

Same thing for psychopathy. The lower your social weights are, and the higher your aggression and dominance weights, the more likely people are to call you a psychopath. But there’s not a bright line. It’s more like height than blood type. Type O and type AB blood are categorically different, but there’s no objective point at which you become “tall” or “short”, those are relative. 

Recap

  • People differ in many ways, but a particularly important way they can differ is in the strength of each of their different governors/emotions. In the cybernetic paradigm, personality is the result of differences between parameters like the setpoints, strength, and sensitivity of different governors.
    • People can have different setpoints for the same governor. 
    • People’s governors can be stronger or weaker when it comes time to negotiate with other governors. When two governors disagree, which one wins? 
    • People’s governors can be more or less sensitive to disturbances. 
    • People’s governors can have different amounts of gain, applying weak corrections or strong corrections.
    • People’s governors can have different amounts of damping. 
  • The Big Five are an abstraction, not a model.
    • The Big Five were discovered through a method called factor analysis, a statistical approach that searches for clusters of correlated variables and hypothesizes factors that might account for the patterns it finds.
    • Psychologists collected large sets of descriptive adjectives like “friendly” and “bashful” and had people rate how well the adjectives applied to themselves or others. Then they used factor analysis to estimate how these ratings co-occurred. This usually gave a solution of five factors.
    • But language doesn’t capture all personality differences, or at least doesn’t capture all of them to the same degree.
  • There are also some individual differences that are not linked to the emotions and drives, like your chronotype or your taste preferences. 
  • The reason to have personality differences is the same as for any kind of differences: diversity.
    • It’s better to have diversity. If there’s only a little danger, a small number of villagers are stockpiling food and reinforcing the town walls. As the danger increases, more and more villagers attend to the safety of the town. 
    • Remember: bees!
  • There appear to be large sex differences in the strength of some of the governors.  
  • Many psychiatric conditions are probably personality disorders, the result of the weights on a person’s various governors being set extremely low or extremely high. 

[Next: LEARNING]

The Mind in the Wheel – Part II: Motivation

slimemoldtimemold, , , , , , , , 8 Comments

[PROLOGUE – EVERYBODY WANTS A ROCK]
[PART I – THERMOSTAT]

Inland Empire: What if *you* only appear as a large singular body, but are actually a congregation of tiny organisms working in unison?

Physical Instrument: Get out of here, dreamer! Don’t you think we’d know about it?

 — Disco Elysium

When you’re hungry, you eat a sandwich. When you feel kind of gross, you take a shower. When you’re lonely, you hang out with friends.

But what about when you want to do all these things and more? Well, you have to pick. You have many different drives, but only one body. If you try to eat a hamburger, kiss a pretty girl, and sing a comic opera at the same time, there will be a traffic jam in the mouth. You will suffocate, or at least you will greatly embarrass yourself. Only a true libertine can eat a sandwich in the shower while hanging out with friends.

To handle this, you need some kind of system for motivation.

For starters, consider this passage from Stephan Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain: 

How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles.

The human mind, and the minds of most vertebrates, operates in essentially the same way. 

Motivation and action are determined by the collective deliberation of multiple governors. Each governor is one of the control systems described in Part I — some governors for thirst, some for pain, some for fear, and so on. They come together and submit bids for different actions and vote on which action to take next.

Inside Out, Disco Elysium, Internal Family Systems, The Sims, etc. — we have a deep intuition that behavior is the result of a negotiation between inner forces that want different things. This keeps manifesting in pop culture, but academic psychology has mostly missed it.

The technical term for this problem is selection, so we’ll refer to this system as the selector. In a physical sense this process probably happens in the basal ganglia, but we’ll let someone else worry about the neuroscience. For now we just want to talk about the psychology. 

We can’t say exactly how the selector works, there are too many mysteries, lots more work to be done, a lot of possible lines of research. But here’s some speculation about how we think it might work, which will sketch out some of the open questions. 

Governors cast votes based on the strength of their error signal. The stronger the error, the more votes it gets. When you’re not at all thirsty, the thirst governor gets basically no votes, because it doesn’t need them. Other priorities are more important. But if you are very thirsty, the thirst governor gets lots of votes (or if you prefer, one very strong vote). If you are starving, your hunger governor gets plenty of votes so it can drive you to eat and become less hungry.

Governors vote for behaviors that they expect will decrease their errors. The thirst governor votes for actions like “find water” and “drink water”. Later, the have-to-pee governor votes for actions like, “find a bathroom”. The pain governor votes for things like “stop picking a fight with the lions, get the hell out of the lion enclosure.”

Governors can also vote against behaviors that would increase their errors. It’s clear that the pain governor can vote against touching a hot stove, even if pain is currently at zero. You don’t have to wait until you burn your hand for your pain governor to realize this will be a bad idea.

This is because governors are predictive. If something is hurting you, the pain governor will vote for you to stop doing that, to avoid the thing that is causing you pain, to withdraw. But you don’t have to be in pain for the pain governor to influence your actions. As behaviors come up for a vote, the pain governor looks at each of them and tries to predict if they will increase its error, that is, if they will cause you pain. If it thinks some behavior will increase its error, the pain governor votes against that behavior. 

So we see that governors don’t only get votes based on their current error signals — they also have the power to vote against behaviors they anticipate will increase their error. Maybe governors cast votes not based on the current strength of their error signal, but based on the predicted change in their error if the action were to be carried out. In this way when hunger is high, the hunger governor gets votes for “eat ham sandwich” because this is predicted to correct the error. And even when pain is zero, the pain governor still gets votes against “touch the electric fence” because touching the fence is predicted to increase its error. This would also fit most observed behavior. 

Wherever votes come from, the governors need to allocate their votes, so there’s some procedure for this as well. One simple way to do things is for governors to propose behaviors and submit bids on those behaviors to the selector, and the strongest bid wins. If this is how it works, then each governor is supporting only one behavior at a given time. 

This seems unlikely. We think it’s more likely that governors support many possible behaviors at once — just like how legislators in a real congress support many possible policies at once.

Actions that happen all the time are so common because they are popular with lots of governors. For example, the “eat a hamburger” action captures the votes of basically the whole hunger voting bloc — salt-hunger, fat-hunger, calorie-hunger, et cetera. Many different hungers will vote for this hamburger. No one dares to vote against the hamburger policy, except maybe the shame governor, if you’ve been taught that hamburgers are sinful or something.   

It’s also not clear whether votes are conserved. If the hunger governor has 100 votes and you give it 50 options, can it only give each option 2 votes? Is this why no one can agree what they want for dinner? Or can it put all 100 votes towards every option that it likes?

Functions

Some governors may get more votes than others. You can imagine why the governor in charge of keeping you breathing might get extra votes — it has a very important job and it can’t wait to build a coalition. The same thing goes for governors like fear and pain. When you’re in serious danger, they always have the votes they need.

Our assumption so far is that the relationship between error signal and votes is linear. But certain governors, controlling things that are critical to your survival, may get more votes for the same amount of error signal — there may be different curves. This is how The Sims did it. If this is the case, it should be possible to discover the formula for votes as a function of error for each governor.

On the other hand, maybe the more critical governors just have stronger error signals than less-important governors. In any case, we should notice that things like suffocation and pain tend to get the votes they need, however that works out under the hood.

Source: GMTK, The Genius AI Behind The Sims

However votes are determined, the outcome is simple. Whatever action gets the most votes is the action you take next, assuming the action wins by a large enough margin.

This is not exactly a winner-take-all system. You can sometimes do more than one thing at once, the selector does try to account for multitasking — you can chew and drive at the same time, since your mouth and hands are not deadlocked. But you cannot e.g. both pee and stay in your clean, dry bed. Someone is going to have to win that vote.

Threshold

An organism that can’t sit still and keeps doing stuff, even when it doesn’t need to, is wasting resources for no reason and putting itself in danger. Sometimes organisms do nothing at all, so our model of the selector needs to account for that.

We think it does that through a mechanism that recognizes votes below a certain threshold and reduces them to zero. In audio engineering, this is called a gate. An audio gate stops sounds below a certain volume from passing through, which is good for cutting out background noise and static. For more information, watch this Vox explainer or listen to some Phil Collins.

You Know What I Mean

In the mental selector, the gate stops votes that are below some minimum threshold. If you are a tiny bit hungry, you shouldn’t bother leaving the house to get a meal, even if there is nothing better to do. Don’t go out and see people if you are only a tiny bit lonely.

An organism without a gate, or with a broken gate, will eat as soon as it is a tiny bit hungry, leave the house as soon as it is even a tiny bit lonely. It will constantly put on and take off its sweater to try to maintain a precise target temperature. But this is clearly not a good use of time or energy. Better to wait until you’re actually some minimum amount of hungry or lonely, before taking steps to correct things.

The gate may act on governors directly, preventing governors with very small error signals from voting at all. When you’re not in any danger, who cares what the fear governor thinks? 

Or it could be that the gate acts on behaviors, and behaviors that get below some fixed number of votes are treated like they got zero votes instead. If no action gets a number of votes above the threshold, then no behavior occurs. 

Also, it seems like an action only happens as long as it beats the next-highest action by a certain number of votes. It’s not clear whether it needs to win by a certain number of votes (“action with the most votes happens as long as it has more than 20 more votes than the action with the second-most votes”) or by some kind of fraction (“action with the most votes happens as long as the action with the second-most votes has no more than 90% its count”), or if this is even a meaningful question given how our motivation system is designed. The important thing is that if “drink coffee” gets 151 votes and “run to catch the bus” gets 152 votes, you will stand there looking like an idiot and miss your bus. (cf. Buridan’s ass)

We designed this model of motivation without concerning ourselves at all with neuroscience, so one reason for optimism is that it is largely convergent with a model of the function of the basal ganglia developed in 1999, also inspired by cybernetics. This was “The Basal Ganglia: A Vertebrate Solution to the Selection Problem?” by Redgrave, Prescott, and Gurney. 

Dark Horse Drives

So far we’ve been assuming that governors are the only things that drive behavior, the only things that ever get votes in the selector. But there may be exceptions.

Curiosity is an unusual case, kind of an enigma. It might be an emotion, but it’s a bit strange. It might be something else, some other kind of signal. 

Like an emotion, curiosity seems to be able to drive behavior. We’ve all done things simply because we were curious. This suggests it might, like the other emotions, be the error signal of some kind of governor. And it seems to be able to compete with the other governors, because curiosity often wins out over concerns like sleep or even sex. 

But in other ways, curiosity does not look like the other emotions. Unlike hunger or fear, it’s not obviously an error signal from a drive that keeps us alive. It’s not obviously connected to immediate survival in the way the other emotions are. A person who doesn’t sleep or breathe dies. A person who doesn’t feel shame is ostracized, and (in nature) soon dies. But a person who doesn’t act on their curiosity is just frustrated. 

And unlike the other emotions, curiosity doesn’t seem to be easily satisfied. Acting on your fear should make you less afraid, acting on your thirst should make you less thirsty, but acting on your curiosity often seems to make you more curious. 

We do have one suggestion of how curiosity might work. Let’s return to the idea that emotions are predictive. The fear governor not only knows that escaping the basement will reduce its error, it can also predict beforehand that entering the basement will increase its error. In general, governors have a model of the world which they use to predict how different behaviors will influence their errors.

Unlike the governors, which vote for behaviors that they predict will correct their errors, curiosity is a special drive that votes for behaviors the emotions have a hard time predicting. Actions can be ranked by how certain the governors are about their consequences. Curiosity, the most perverse, votes for actions that the other governors rate as having the greatest uncertainty.

This helps us learn about actions that the governors might otherwise ignore. It’s another way to encourage exploration. If you only act in response to emotions, then you lose the opportunity to learn about things that might be really important later. It’s a better long-term strategy to use your extra energy to try things that are probably safe, but where you aren’t sure what will happen. (See this paper for more on this kind of model.)

You know who loves doing this? Toddlers. Toddlers love doing this. It may not be that children are more curious than adults, but simply that adults have learned more about the consequences of their actions and have fewer of these very uncertain behaviors to explore. 

Self-Control

One of the mysteries of motivation is that sometimes, you want to do something and it’s super easy to do. Why is it sometimes easy to do things?

The answer is simple. When a behavior gets votes from a governor, it’s easy to do. Outside of clinical depression, you don’t have to drag yourself to a delicious meal, or to hear the new hot gossip. Popular emotions are throwing all their votes behind these actions, they are going to become policy. 

Behaviors that don’t have a governor behind them are hard to do. Evolution didn’t include a governor for “write your term paper”, so this project tends to go pretty slowly, especially if it’s in competition with behaviors that do have governors voting for them, like “hang out with your friends”. Sometimes the term paper never happens. 

The same thing goes for the big-picture aspirations people so often struggle with. Intellectually you might want to become a famous author, or learn Japanese, or memorize pi to 100 digits. But the sad truth is that no governor is willing to support these ideas. You just don’t have the votes.

Things that can’t get votes from a governor only get votes from your executive function. Executive function must not have many votes to spend, because these actions tend to be very difficult. 

Even if you can temporarily scrape together the votes for one of these actions, you have to hold your coalition together. This usually fails. You will inevitably get distracted once any of the other governors gets a large enough error signal to vote for something else, like getting a snack. This is why you are always looking in the fridge instead of studying. 

Wait, how did I get here?

One workaround is to convince a governor to vote for these actions. If you get a lot of praise and status at school for doing well on your math test, social governors that are concerned with status will be willing to vote for math-related activities in the future, because they realize that it’s good for their bottom line. Or if there’s a pretty girl in your Japanese class, you may find that it becomes easier for you to work on your presentation, in an effort to impress her. No points for guessing which governor is voting for this! 

This is probably why people seem to find over and over again that money is not very motivating.

Money is motivating when it can directly address your needs. If you are starving, the connection between $5 and a block of cheese is pretty clear. As a result, the hunger governor will vote for things that get you $5. 

But in a modern economy, most people’s remaining needs cannot be easily met by more money. They already have enough money to get all the food, warmth, sleep, and so on that they need. The only drives they have problems satisfying are the drives where, for one reason, there isn’t or can’t be a normal market. 

Social factors like friendship or a feeling of importance are often left unsatisfied, but these are hard to trade directly for money. You can’t buy these things for any amount, or at least, there are no effective markets in these “goods”. So money is no longer very motivating for people who need these things. Their active governors, the ones with big errors, the ones that get the votes, understand that more money won’t solve their problems, so they don’t vote for actions that would get you more money.

As we hinted at above, we might assume that there is also an executive function that gets some votes. Executive function is why you can make yourself do dumb things that are in no way related to your survival, why you can plan for the very-long-term, and also why you have self-control in the face of things like cold and pain. 

Eventually we may discover that what appears to be “self-control” is actually just the combined action of social emotions like shame. It may be that there is no such thing as an executive function, and what feels like self-control is really the result of different social emotions, the drives to do things like maintain our status or avoid shame, voting for things that are in their interest. But for now let’s keep the assumption that there is someone driving this thing.

Even so, executive function doesn’t have very many votes, which is why most people cannot starve themselves to death or hold their breath until they suffocate. At some point, the suffocation governor ends up with so many votes that it can make you do whatever it wants, and it always votes for the same thing: breathe. 

Happiness

Here’s another thing people find surprising: why don’t we maximize happiness?

People often complain about not being as happy as they would like. But their revealed preferences are clear: they don’t always do things that make them happy, even when they know what those things are, even when it’s easy. People often choose to do things that are painful, difficult, even pointless.

This is because there is no governor voting for happiness. Happiness is more like a side-effect, something that happens whenever you successfully correct any governor’s error signal. People who live challenging lives end up happy, assuming they are able to meet those challenges, but there is no force inside you that is voting for you to go and become more happy per se.

Remember that happiness isn’t an emotion. All emotions are error signals generated by a governor dedicated to controlling some signal related to survival. Governors have a simple relationship with the error signals they generate: they vote for behaviors that will drive their error signal towards zero. So if happiness were some kind of emotion, the governor that generated it would vote, whenever possible, to drive happiness towards zero! 

Clearly people don’t behave in a way that tries to drive happiness to zero. While we aren’t happiness-maximizers either, many of our actions do make us happier, and when we take an action that makes us less happy, we’re less likely to take that action in the future. This is clear evidence that happiness isn’t an emotion.

The paradoxes of motivation are a lot like the paradoxes of democracy. A democracy does not institute the policies that are the best for its citizens. It doesn’t even institute the policies that are most popular. Democracies institute the policies that get enough votes. 

Similarly, a person does not take the actions that make them happiest. They do not take the actions that are best for them, or even the actions that are most likely to lead to their survival. No, people take the actions that get the most votes. 

Direct video feed from inside your head 

Like with democracy, the system still mostly works, because “what gets the most votes” is close enough to “what’s good for you”, enough of the time. But there are all kinds of situations that lead to behavior that can appear mystifying, until you learn to see things through the lens of parliamentary procedure.

There’s nothing wrong with not being happy. You can not be happy and still be doing perfectly fine. So why do people find this startling, and ruminate about their lack of happiness? Isn’t it strange that people obsess so much over happiness, but don’t actually change their actions to become more happy?

The explanation may be purely social. In modern American culture, we are expected to be happy. Not being happy is seen as a sign of failure and weakness. Being unhappy, or even just feeling neutral, is enough to make us lose status in the eyes of others, it can be the source of ridicule and shame. Being anything less than perfectly happy can be enough to make you a subject of pity. So even though happiness is not directly controlled, if you exist in a culture with these norms, some of your social governors (associated with emotions like shame and drives for status) will vote for you to do things that will make you happy, just so you can get one over on the Joneses.

But our social emotions are not voting to make us happy per se — they are actually concerned with making sure we avoid the social consequences that would come from appearing unhappy. They want to make sure that we don’t lose status for being seen as gloomy, and keep us from feeling shame for our melancholy. One way to do this is to vote for actions that will make you happier. But equally good, better even, is to vote for actions that make you seem happy! 

So other things being equal, the social emotions tend to drive us towards the appearance of happiness, rather than actual happiness. Actual happiness may or may not make us appear happy in a way that will increase our status or reduce our shame. But the appearance of happiness always appears happy. So that’s what gets the votes. 

This is what makes people neurotic about not being as happy as they should be. When they’re feeling reflective, it makes some people worry that they are fake, since they feel consistently driven towards the appearance of happiness, even at the expense of what would actually make them happy. 

This is a well-known problem in contemporary American culture, and for cultures that have borrowed American standards for happiness. But most other cultures don’t expect people to be happy all the time. Without this expectation, people from these cultures don’t have the problem of feeling like they must both seek happiness and perform it, and don’t run into this weird vicious cycle. (Though of course, other cultures have problems of their own.)

For a similar example, consider the problem of self-sabotage. In some cultures and contexts it’s not appropriate to perform better than your peers, or to get too much better too quickly (cf. tall poppy syndrome). In this case, some of the social governors will vote against performing your best, to avoid the social disapproval that might come from performing better than you “should”.

This suggests that the treatment for self-sabotage is to surround yourself with people who think that failure is shameful and success is impressive, rather than the other way around. And it suggests that something you can do for the people around you is to express polite disappointment when they accomplish less than they hope for and genuine enthusiasm when they accomplish more. Even an expression of envy can be a supportive thing to do for your friends, as long as it’s clear that it comes from a place of admiration rather than competition. 

Of course, if you go too far in this direction, you can end up with a culture that is neurotic about success rather than about conformity. Decide your own point on the tradeoff, but we’d argue that self-sabotage is worse than pushing yourself too hard. 

Suffering

Why do people sometimes seek out extreme experiences? Why do we subject ourselves to things like roller coasters, saunas, horror movies, extreme sports, and even outright suffering?

Psychologist Paul Bloom explains these decisions in terms of chosen suffering versus unchosen suffering. For example, in this interview he says, “You should avoid being assaulted… there’s no bright side to the death of a loved one… there’s no happiness in watching your house burn down… nor is there happiness to be found in getting a horrible disease. Unchosen suffering is awful.” 

In contrast he says, “chosen suffering, the sort of suffering we seek-out can be a source of pleasure … You choose to have kids, you choose to run a marathon, you choose to eat spicy food. You choose these things because there’s a payoff later in future pleasure.”

We think this is close. He’s picked the right examples, but getting assaulted, losing a loved one, or getting a horrible disease, are just bad. Choosing them wouldn’t make them any better. So it can’t be the chosen versus unchosen nature of these examples that makes the difference.

A better way to think about this is whether the suffering is under your control. If suffering is under your control, it can be corrected at any time. Since happiness is generated when errors are corrected, then controlled suffering is a neat hack — it’s a free way to generate happiness at no risk to actual life and limb.

Controlled suffering is like a sauna or a horror movie. You’re sweating or you’re scared, but you can stop at any time, and stopping feels pretty great, it’s a relief. The uncontrolled version would be more like being trapped in a sauna, or locked inside a haunted house — not so pleasurable, and not the sort of thing people go looking for. A really uncontrolled version would be the experience of being trapped inside a burning building, or being chased by an actual serial killer, where the stakes are not only real, they have permanent consequences. 

When given a choice, people only tend to choose controlled suffering, and tend to suffer uncontrolled suffering only against their choosing. So almost all chosen suffering is controlled, and all uncontrolled suffering is unchosen. This should come as no surprise. But this has led Bloom to mistake the choosing for the active ingredient, rather than the controlled nature of the suffering. 

Choosing uncontrolled suffering doesn’t make it good for you. Choosing to get assaulted is about as bad as getting assaulted by accident. Unchosen but controlled suffering isn’t usually that bad. Taking a wrong turn and ending up in the sauna by mistake is not that much of a bummer.  

If you do want to become happier, the solution is simple — make yourself hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, tired, lonely, scared, etc. And then correct these errors promptly. It will feel amazing. If it doesn’t feel amazing, you are probably depressed in some more serious way. (See upcoming sections for more speculation about what this means for you.)

Recap

  • There is a governor for each drive, as described in Part I.
    • Governors vote for behaviors that they expect will decrease their errors. 
    • Governors are predictive, they will also vote against actions that they anticipate will increase their error. 
    • The number of votes each governor gets is a function of the size of their error and/or the predicted change in error of the actions available.
  • Behavior is determined by the collective negotiation of all governors.
    • The technical term for this problem is selection, so this set of systems is called the selector. 
    • There is a mechanism called a gate that takes votes below a certain threshold and reduces them to zero. In the mental selector, the gate stops votes that are below some minimum threshold. This ensures that actions must get at least some minimum number of votes to be performed.
    • Behaviors like “eat cake” that have a governor behind them are easy to do. Behaviors like “study for your math test” that don’t have a governor behind them are hard to do. This resolves most mysteries of self-control. 

Discussion Questions

  1. What behaviors do you find it really easy to do? What behaviors do you find it really challenging to do? 
  2. When was a time you chose to do something that was painful, difficult, or pointless?
  3. What kinds of extreme experiences do you seek out? Why do you do that? 
  4. Is each governor’s influence conserved? If the hunger governor has 100 votes and you give it 50 options, can it only give each option 2 votes? Or can it put all 100 votes towards every option? Is this why no one can agree what they want for dinner?

[Next: PERSONALITY]