Summary: Are we more objective creatures than we seem? Erik Benson suggests that subjective thoughts are nothing more than stale objective thoughts that we didn't want to re-think. A guest essay.
Do you ever find that when you drive down a street with dozens of interesting restaurants, looking for a place to eat, you unconsciously ignore most of them and frequent the same three or four over and over again? Maybe this is because you've systematically tried all of them and now have a short list of the ones you like, but how would that explain the times when you feel the same narrowing perspective even when you haven't already tried every choice? We do this with more than just restaurants: we cycle through the same TV channels, the same web sites, the same albums in our music collection, even the same brands of toothpaste and shampoo. In fact, if there's anything that can be said about our choice-making skills its that we don't systematically try every option. Seeing as how that must surely limit the richness of our lives, you gotta ask yourself why not?
We'll assume that on this street there are no subliminal signals in the decor of one restaraunt that says “go away” or “eat here” to your subconscious brain, because a better explanation is far less exotic: when you go out to find a place to eat you're not really chosing from all possible restaurants, but rather you are choosing from among the answers you came up with from previous decisions. And once you've hit a certain sweet spot of collected decisions, you stop trying to make more.
The effect is what we know best: from a magnificent palette of choices we artificially reduce them to a scant few. It's the “there's nothin' on TV“ syndrome. But this cerebral laziness reaches further than just our choice of eateries, and has a deep impact on other subjective thoughts, including our deepest opinions.
Let's look at the decision making process in more detail. I can boil down the procedure into a few generalized steps:
The only reason different people make different choices is because we each have slightly different sources of information to draw upon for steps 1 and 2, and over time we each have a different set of saved Values with which to base new decisions on (I'm capitalizing the word Values for a reason here, which I'll get into later). Similar questions, when considered with different choices and different Values for the qualities of each choice, lead to the variety of decisions that we see manifest themselves in different people.
It seems simplistic, but for some reason my mind has been spinning lately on a couple of the subtleties present in this process. For example, exactly how do we “gather data”? Where exactly is the Value of each choice stored, and how is it formatted? What qualities do these Values have, and in what ways can they be manipulated (ie. do they obey rules of addition and subtraction)?
Let's say I'm trying to figure out how I'd like to get to work tomorrow. First, I need to figure out what the options are. I delve into my memory and pull up the two most common ways for me to typically get to work: I can walk to work or get a ride from my wife. Normally, I would stop gathering data there, lock those two options in place, and move to the next step. After moving the next step, it becomes more unlikely that I would consider new options, as it would require that I take a step back in the process.
On the other hand, sometimes I might continue to think further about options (like now), because—in this case—I've discovered a peculiarity about my thinking process and want to be a little more thorough in the hopes of exposing some of the wiring behind it. So, I pull up the fact that I used to take the bus to work occasionally and add that to the list. That exhausts the query of my past memory as far as finding options, but my mind's next frontier to explore is the realm of all possibilities. So I query my mind for ways other people get to work: bike, carpool, rollerblade, Segway, skateboard, helicopter, private jet, row boat, skipping, jumping rope, teleporter, time machine, or by digging a tunnel.
(That's not an exhaustive list, alas, but it'll have to suffice. Most of us will never attempt to exhaustively list every option we could think of, because it's rarely to our advantage to work so hard. The psychologist George Miller even noticed that our attention isn't capable of tracking more than seven things (plus or minus two) at a time, and I suspect this is related to the sensation of having thought queries run-out after a while.)
So now I've gathered a list of possibilities, making Step one complete. For Step two I need to gather data about these possibilities. I could say that my mind quite literally draws up a table with the options and puts the options in one column, and their related qualities in the other. Attached to each quality is either a Value or another table with a list of qualities. An example of a straight Value might be when I list the qualities for driving and it has the quality of Convenience which gets a Value of “+++++” or something (meaning really good—I hesitate to use integers, so I'll use pluses and minuses instead). But some options may be associated with even more qualities and Values; if I was to contemplate walking, for example, then weather would be a factor and I'd have Value opinions for each possibility there. Raining would be “----”, Really Cold is “----”, Mild “++”, Sunny “+++”, and Hot would be “--”.
So now there's this nested list of qualities and Values (I'll talk about where the Values come from in a moment), and all I have to do is run down each row in the table, expanding qualities until I have a long list of Values for each option. When there are choices to be made about the Weather and stuff I can step back and gather more data about that before proceeding, and then take the Value that applies, or I can mentally hold two possibilities in my head for the next round when there are fewer choices to be made and therefore more space to explore them. In the end, though, either way, I have an idea of which choice appeals to me most, calculated by whichever choice has the highest sum of pluses going for it.
If I was writing a computer program to do this, it probably wouldn't be very fast. Part of the reason for spelling out each step was to give you an idea of how much work there is to make a decision (not to mention read about it). So to speed things up I'd consider saving the old decisions in a file and re-using them in the future so I could skip the first two, or even the first three steps in this laborious decision making process. This is an obvious optimization to any computer programmer, and I think my brain does the same thing, too.
Lets take the restaurant example again. Perhaps we continue to go to the same places over and over again because the decision tree for the question of where to eat has already been saved in our memory, and it would take more work to introduce new choices at the top. There's a very physical sensation of effort that occurs when you're forced to consider something new--I think that's what it feels like when our brain has to consider brand new data, and must now dredge up the complex table of comparisons it'd made before, adjusting it in so many places to account for what the new data implies.
The interesting part, to me, is that this process is, on its surface, completely objective. It relies entirely on the addition and comparison of Values that qualities have, and at no point to we really need to make a decision.
You might say that the Values themselves are subjective. I may give walking in the rain a “+++” or a “---”, and that's up to me. But that brings me to my next hypothesis. I think the Values themselves are merely the approximate results of previous decisions.
When I think of walking in the rain, I instantly have an initial negative reaction, but if I so desired I could reconsider this decision and find nuances in it. For example, if I wanted to I could add in the quality of childhood nostalgia, and then I could sway the net Value over to the positive and walk in the rain knowing that it would bring me some sort of pleasure—summoning old memories of the times when I've had fun in the rain.
If I did that I'd now have two values for walking in the rain, one which is negative and will probably get applied to run-of-the-mill walking-in-the-rain decisions, and another that's positive and for special occasions when I'm willing to put in a little more effort in recalling my past. If I were to choose how to get to work tomorrow, I might re-parse the decision tree to take this into account, but knowing that I'm rarely in the mood to exercise my imagination too much in the morning, I'd probably still employ the negative value. This process of caching old queries by assigning them a relative Value allows us to make a lot more decisions per day than we might otherwise be able to.
But on the other hand, it also forces us to rely on the quality of our past decisions in order to hope that we might continue to make good decisions. Alas, those values aren't subjective. Subjectivity is an illusion caused by the way our brain saves past decisions (perhaps you could call them Opinions). At some point we arrived at our Opinions by objectively parsing a full table of choices, but now we've made our choice, forgotten the table and the process we went through to get it, we claim these Values--these Opinions--as our own, and as a quality that defines us.
Something bothers me about this, though. It makes us look as if we are truly objective creatures, always relying on data rather than whim. I think that this is because data goes bad, it gets stale. The longer you cache a Value without refactoring it and taking new things into consideration, the higher its chances are that it no longer correctly represents that actual Value you would assign to it if you were to reconsider it with new and updated data. At the same time, the longer you cache a Value, the more difficult it becomes to refactor it because there's much more work you have to do first: gathering data, tallying Values, and applying any changes in your Opinion to every other Opinion you've built on that decision since.
Our brains are so accustomed to pulling up the old Value, and must go through so much work to change it, that it won't be easily convinced to look deeper than it had to in the past. When someone asks you “why didn't you consider this...” you feel an instinctual locking up—a brain freeze—and a strong reluctance not just to go all the way back to square one, but to throw away all the mental work you've carefully done in the past.
Have you ever been around someone who has suddenly been presented from the results of a large decision? Becoming a Christian, for example, deciding that there is a God. Suddenly, a fundamental Value has been reset in their minds and almost every decision has to be refactored, because they can't really rely on saved Values that are made on the assumption that there wasn't a God. So the first few weeks of being a Christian are memorable because of the number of Values that get reset. It's the same when you move to a new city; your brain has to re-evaluate all the decisions about how to get to work, what to eat for dinner, and so-on. It is an exhausting, and yet refreshing at the same time. It is something that we long for occasionally, remembering how much more alive we felt when we first moved to a new city, or started a new life after marriage, or entered on the path set by a new philosophy. I think this cobweb-sweeping emotion is fundamentally tied to the peculiarities of our decision-making process.
On the other side, there are times when people react to new information by covering their ears. Why is this? Could it be that we are not fully in control of this process? That sometimes new information can, by its mere introduction, force our brains to throw out saved Values and refactor them based on this new data? This feels like even more evidence to support the fact that our decisions are not made subjectively, but objectively. There's a pressure to keep things saved for as long as possible to conserve mental energy, but there is also a process in place that forces us to reconsider decisions when we know for a fact that new information is available. It's on this thin balance between efficiency and accuracy that we occasionally try to mediate processes, forcing certain decisions to remain static and others to be re-evaluated. But is this all we have? Is consciousness merely the emergence that occurs at the cusp of these two forces? If so, I don't think that that's much of a consciousness at all.
Erik Benson's writings can be found online at erikbenson.com.
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