Food

Employer and Employee Model of Human Psychology

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This post builds on the ideas in the series of posts on predictive processing and the followup posts, and also on those relating truth and expectation. Consequently the current post will likely not make much sense to those who have not read the earlier content, or to those that read it but mainly disagreed.

We set out the model by positing three members of the “company” that constitutes a human being:

The CEO. This is the predictive engine in the predictive processing model.

The Vice President. In the same model, this is the force of the historical element in the human being, which we used to respond to the “darkened room” problem. Thus for example the Vice President is responsible for the fact that someone is likely to eat soon, regardless of what they believe about this. Likewise, it is responsible for the pursuit of sex, the desire for respect and friendship, and so on. In general it is responsible for behaviors that would have been historically chosen and preserved by natural selection.

The Employee. This is the conscious person who has beliefs and goals and free will and is reflectively aware of these things. In other words, this is you, at least in a fairly ordinary way of thinking of yourself. Obviously, in another way you are composed from all of them.

Why have we arranged things in this way? Descartes, for example, would almost certainly disagree violently with this model. The conscious person, according to him, would surely be the CEO, and not an employee. And what is responsible for the relationship between the CEO and the Vice President? Let us start with this point first, before we discuss the Employee. We make the predictive engine the CEO because in some sense this engine is responsible for everything that a human being does, including the behaviors preserved by natural selection. On the other hand, the instinctive behaviors of natural selection are not responsible for everything, but they can affect the course of things enough that it is useful for the predictive engine to take them into account. Thus for example in the post on sex and minimizing uncertainty, we explained why the predictive engine will aim for situations that include having sex and why this will make its predictions more confident. Thus, the Vice President advises certain behaviors, the CEO talks to the Vice President, and the CEO ends up deciding on a course of action, which ultimately may or may not be the one advised by the Vice President.

While neither the CEO nor the Vice President is a rational being, since in our model we place the rationality in the Employee, that does not mean they are stupid. In particular, the CEO is very good at what it does. Consider a role playing video game where you have a character that can die and then resume. When someone first starts to play the game, they may die frequently. After they are good at the game, they may die only rarely, perhaps once in many days or many weeks. Our CEO is in a similar situation, but it frequently goes 80 years or more without dying, on its very first attempt. It is extremely good at its game.

What are their goals? The CEO basically wants accurate predictions. In this sense, it has one unified goal. What exactly counts as more or less accurate here would be a scientific question that we probably cannot resolve by philosophical discussion. In fact, it is very possible that this would differ in different circumstances: in this sense, even though it has a unified goal, it might not be describable by a consistent utility function. And even if it can be described in that way, since the CEO is not rational, it does not (in itself) make plans to bring about correct predictions. Making good predictions is just what it does, as falling is what a rock does. There will be some qualifications on this, however, when we discuss how the members of the company relate to one another.

The Vice President has many goals: eating regularly, having sex, having and raising children, being respected and liked by others, and so on. And even more than in the case of the CEO, there is no reason for these desires to form a coherent set of preferences. Thus the Vice President might advise the pursuit of one goal, but then change its mind in the middle, for no apparent reason, because it is suddenly attracted by one of the other goals.

Overall, before the Employee is involved, human action is determined by a kind of negotiation between the CEO and the Vice President. The CEO, which wants good predictions, has no special interest in the goals of the Vice President, but it cooperates with them because when it cooperates its predictions tend to be better.

What about the Employee? This is the rational being, and it has abstract concepts which it uses as a formal copy of the world. Before I go on, let me insist clearly on one point. If the world is represented in a certain way in the Employee’s conceptual structure, that is the way the Employee thinks the world is. And since you are the Employee, that is the way you think the world actually is. The point is that once we start thinking this way, it is easy to say, “oh, this is just a model, it’s not meant to be the real thing.” But as I said here, it is not possible to separate the truth of statements from the way the world actually is: your thoughts are formulated in concepts, but they are thoughts about the way things are. Again, all statements are maps, and all statements are about the territory.

The CEO and the Vice President exist as soon a human being has a brain; in fact some aspects of the Vice President would exist even before that. But the Employee, insofar as it refers to something with rational and self-reflective knowledge, takes some time to develop. Conceptual knowledge of the world grows from experience: it doesn’t exist from the beginning. And the Employee represents goals in terms of its conceptual structure. This is just a way of saying that as a rational being, if you say you are pursuing a goal, you have to be able to describe that goal with the concepts that you have. Consequently you cannot do this until you have some concepts.

We are ready to address the question raised earlier. Why are you the Employee, and not the CEO? In the first place, the CEO got to the company first, as we saw above. Second, consider what the conscious person does when they decide to pursue a goal. There seems to be something incoherent about “choosing a goal” in the first place: you need a goal in order to decide which means will be a good means to choose. And yet, as I said here, people make such choices anyway. And the fact that you are the Employee, and not the CEO, is the explanation for this. If you were the CEO, there would indeed be no way to choose an end. That is why the actual CEO makes no such choice: its end is already determinate, namely good predictions. And you are hired to help out with this goal. Furthermore, as a rational being, you are smarter than the CEO and the Vice President, so to speak. So you are allowed to make complicated plans that they do not really understand, and they will often go along with these plans. Notably, this can happen in real life situations of employers and employees as well.

But take an example where you are choosing an end: suppose you ask, “What should I do with my life?” The same basic thing will happen if you ask, “What should I do today,” but the second question may be easier to answer if you have some answer to the first. What sorts of goals do you propose in answer to the first question, and what sort do you actually end up pursuing?

Note that there are constraints on the goals that you can propose. In the first place, you have to be able to describe the goal with the concepts you currently have: you cannot propose to seek a goal that you cannot describe. Second, the conceptual structure itself may rule out some goals, even if they can be described. For example, the idea of good is part of the structure, and if something is thought to be absolutely bad, the Employee will (generally) not consider proposing this as a goal. Likewise, the Employee may suppose that some things are impossible, and it will generally not propose these as goals.

What happens then is this: the Employee proposes some goal, and the CEO, after consultation with the Vice President, decides to accept or reject it, based on the CEO’s own goal of getting good predictions. This is why the Employee is an Employee: it is not the one ultimately in charge. Likewise, as was said, this is why the Employee seems to be doing something impossible, namely choosing goals. Steven Kaas makes a similar point,

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going “a most judicious choice, sire”.

This is not quite the same thing, since in our model you do in fact make real decisions, including decisions about the end to be pursued. Nonetheless, the point about not being the one ultimately in charge is correct. David Hume also says something similar when he says, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume’s position is not exactly right, and in fact seems an especially bad way of describing the situation, but the basic point that there is something, other than yourself in the ordinary sense, judging your proposed means and ends and deciding whether to accept them, is one that stands.

Sometimes the CEO will veto a proposal precisely because it very obviously leaves things vague and uncertain, which is contrary to its goal of having good predictions. I once spoke of the example that a person cannot directly choose to “write a paper.” In our present model, the Employee proposes “we’re going to write a paper now,” and the CEO responds, “That’s not a viable plan as it stands: we need more detail.”

While neither the CEO nor the Vice President is a rational being, the Vice President is especially irrational, because of the lack of unity among its goals. Both the CEO and the Employee would like to have a unified plan for one’s whole life: the CEO because this makes for good predictions, and the Employee because this is the way final causes work, because it helps to make sense of one’s life, and because “objectively good” seems to imply something which is at least consistent, which will never prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. But the lack of unity among the Vice President’s goals means that it will always come to the CEO and object, if the person attempts to coherently pursue any goal. This will happen even if it originally accepts the proposal to seek a particular goal.

Consider this real life example from a relationship between an employer and employee:

 

Employer: Please construct a schedule for paying these bills.

Employee: [Constructs schedule.] Here it is.

Employer: Fine.

[Time passes, and the first bill comes due, according to the schedule.]

Employer: Why do we have to pay this bill now instead of later?

 

In a similar way, this sort of scenario is common in our model:

 

Vice President: Being fat makes us look bad. We need to stop being fat.

CEO: Ok, fine. Employee, please formulate a plan to stop us from being fat.

Employee: [Formulates a diet.] Here it is.

[Time passes, and the plan requires skipping a meal.]

Vice President: What is this crazy plan of not eating!?!

CEO: Fine, cancel the plan for now and we’ll get back to it tomorrow.

 

In the real life example, the behavior of the employer is frustrating and irritating to the employee because there is literally nothing they could have proposed that the employer would have found acceptable. In the same way, this sort of scenario in our model is frustrating to the Employee, the conscious person, because there is no consistent plan they could have proposed that would have been acceptable to the Vice President: either they would have objected to being fat, or they would have objected to not eating.

In later posts, we will fill in some details and continue to show how this model explains various aspects of human psychology. We will also answer various objections.

Knowing Knowing and Known

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In his work On the Soul, Aristotle points out that knowledge of powers depends on the knowledge of activities, and knowledge of activities depends on knowledge of the objects of the activities:

It is necessary for the student of these forms of soul first to find a definition of each, expressive of what it is, and then to investigate its derivative properties, &c. But if we are to express what each is, viz. what the thinking power is, or the perceptive, or the nutritive, we must go farther back and first give an account of thinking or perceiving, for in the order of investigation the question of what an agent does precedes the question, what enables it to do what it does. If this is correct, we must on the same ground go yet another step farther back and have some clear view of the objects of each; thus we must start with these objects, e.g. with food, with what is perceptible, or with what is intelligible.

A little thought will establish that this is entirely necessary. In order to have a general knowledge of the power or the activity, however, it will be sufficient to have a general knowledge of the object. But given that human knowledge proceeds from the general to the specific, it would be reasonable to believe that a detailed knowledge of the power or activity might require a somewhat equally detailed knowledge of the object.

We can see how this would happen by thinking about the example of eating and food. A general idea of both eating and food might be this: eating is taking in other bodies and using them for growth and for energy for other living activities, and food is what can be taken in and used in this way.

Both the idea of eating and the idea of food here are fairly general, and due to their generality they leave open various questions. For example, why is not possible to live off air? Air is a body, and in physics it is in some sense convertible with energy, so it would not seem unreasonable if it could provide the matter and energy that we need in order to grow and to live in other ways.

The general account does not of course assert that this is a possibility, but neither does it deny the possibility. So if someone thinks that the general account tells them all that needs to be known about eating and food, they will not be unlikely to conclude that living off air should be a possibility. If someone drew this conclusion it would be an example of impatience with respect to truth. The example is not very realistic, of course, even if there are a few people who actually draw this conclusion, but this lack of realism is not because of some flaw in the idea of the knowledge of activities depending on the knowledge of objects, but just because most people already accept that air is not a kind of food, even if they do not know why it is not. So they already have a somewhat more detailed knowledge of the object, and therefore also of the activity.

Something similar will result with other powers of the soul, and with powers in general. In the case of knowledge in particular, a general knowledge of knowing will depend on a general knowledge of the known or knowable, and a detailed knowledge of knowing will depend on a detailed knowledge of the known or knowable. And just as in the example above, a general knowledge does not necessarily lead someone into error, but it can leave open questions, and one who is impatient for truth might draw detailed conclusions too soon. In this case, a likely result would be that someone confuses the mode of knowledge and the mode of the known, although this would not be the only way to fall into error.

Sean Collins discusses the history of science and its relationship with philosophy:

In my post of March 6, I noted that we must distinguish between what science has been and what it ought to be, or what it is naturally ordained to be. It is therefore a mistake to take any current or past state of science and construe that as universal without any argument. It is a mistake, for example, to suppose that the Galilean paradigm of physics as “written in mathematical terms” is a universal truth, merely on the ground that physics has been that way for some time, and indeed with some fair degree of success. Or, again, I shall argue, it is a mistake to infer that science consists essentially, and by its permanent universal nature, in reasoning from artificial “paradigms,” even if the recent history of science suggests that.

But from this one might be inclined to draw either of two diametrically opposite inferences. One would be to suppose that history and science have nothing to do with each other, otherwise than accidentally. We should therefore try to find out what science is really supposed to be, and let it be that. But the opposite conclusion seems perhaps equally justifiable: namely that science is essentially historical, so that stages in its progress are precisely stages, and therefore ought not to be confused with the universal character of science itself.

Which is the right conclusion? Should we think that science and history have any real connection? To make the question suitably concrete, we should first recognize that this is really a question about humanity. It is humanity we are wondering about when we ask whether our knowledge has any essential relation with history. It is about the being called “man” himself that we must finally ask whether there is something essentially historical.

But then we can see, perhaps, that this is no small question, and it would scarcely do it justice to propose an answer to it in a few short paragraphs. For now, I will let it suffice to have asked the question. But I would also like to take note of some significant historical facts which suggest a direction in which to seek an answer. And after that I will propose what I think is an absolutely fundamental and critical principle on the way to finding an answer.

The signs I have in mind are these. Some 2500 years ago, Aristotle wrote his Organon, which laid out the delineations of “science.” Aristotle argued that science, in the strictest sense, must be knowledge from universal causes, that these causes must be expressed in self-evident principles, and that the principles must derive from the essences of things as expressed in their definitions. Historically, that view seemed to hold a very firm sway for a very long time, until something strange happened: there was a revolt. Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes were primary agents of the revolt. The revolt was in large measure a backlash against entrenched stagnation, against which irrepressible spirits finally grew indignant. From that moment on, intellectual culture became bifurcated into “science” and “philosophy,” and that bifurcation remains to this day.

Those who remain in the camp of the “philosophers” often stake their claims on the basis of the original claims of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. They resist the intrusions of science on the alleged ground that only philosophy proceeds in a truly universal mode, seeking definitions by “genus and difference,” aiming at truly universal causes, and proposing its theses with complete certitude. Those, on the other hand, who decide to be “scientists” stake their claims on the basis of what they take to be reality itself. They notice the truly astonishing degree to which physical reality has a structure, a structure which reaches down deeply into the materiality of things. They see, all too well, that the discovery and appreciation of that structure absolutely demands a mode of thought which is not that of conventional philosophy. And they cannot, moreover, help but notice that conventional philosophers have often tended to either be completely ignorant of that structure, or worse yet, to not care about it, or to deny that it matters, or to deny that it really exists at all.

To describe this by a succinct approximation, we might say that the philosophical mindset tries to reason from characteristics of the mind: from its yearning for what transcends the murkiness of matter. The scientific mindset, by contrast, seeks to reason from the characteristics of physical reality, even possibly at the expense of the aspirations of human reason towards what is immaterial.

While one might agree that it does not “do justice” to the question in the sense of discussing it adequately, we can see from what has been said that one cannot fully separate science from history. If we ask, “what is the nature of science,” we are asking about the nature of human knowing. In order to answer this, we require knowledge of knowing. But since knowing knowing in a detailed way depends on knowing the known in a detailed way, the question of whether history is essentially involved in knowing knowing depends on whether knowing the known in a detailed way is an essentially historical process.

Human beings and especially the life of an individual human being are very small parts of reality. One consequence is that the single lifetime of an individual is not enough to come to a detailed knowledge of the physical world without an essential dependence on the work of others, which dependence implies a historical process. The “astonishing degree to which physical reality has a structure” is something that necessarily takes many human lifetimes to come to know, and is the collective work of the human race, not the work of an individual.

Speaking of Aristotle’s attitude towards matter in science, Collins says:

Aristotle, as I have noted, saw that materiality is a true principle of natural being. Henceforth, it was no longer necessary to shun matter, as the Platonists had, as if it were repugnant to philosophical endeavors. One could reason about the natural, physical world, and one could reason about it as physical.

Yet we are — no doubt inevitably — slow to grasp the implications of materiality. Even about this very historical fact, many of us tend to think in a quasi-Platonic way. And what I am about to assert will no doubt astonish some readers: even Aristotle himself continued to think in a somewhat Platonic way, despite his recognition of the principle of materiality. But anyone who is acquainted with the history of thought shouldn’t be entirely surprised at my assertion. It is common — ordinary, in fact — for great thinkers, who find themselves at the dawn of a new and fuller vision of the order of things, to have one foot remaining in the older vision, not entirely able to see the implications of their own new intuitions. If one assumes that thought ought to evolve, as opposed to merely changing in revolutionary fits, one should find this even perhaps a little reassuring.

So what do I mean when I say that Aristotle thinks in a semi-Platonic way? Briefly, I mean that, even despite himself in a way, he continues to seek the accounts, the logoi, of things in a way that would place them more in the order of the purely intellectual than the physical. For example, he seeks to understand what time is in a way that makes virtually no appeal to such physical evidence as we have nowadays through physical experimentation. (Of course! How could he make appeal to something that didn’t exist yet?) He supposes, rather inevitably, that simply thinking about time and motion from the relatively deficient point of view of something called  “common experience” will give him something like a sufficient account of what he is trying to understand. And in the end, his vision of an eternal first motion as the source of time, a motion perfectly circular and unchanging, deriving from the causality of a First Mover who could not directly be the source of any contingent effects — this is a vision which now, from the point of view of contemporary science as well as Christian theology, rightly strikes us as not yet a mature vision in its understanding of the role of matter in the order of the cosmos.

This, to be sure, is not a criticism of Aristotle, as if to suggest that he should have thought something else; rather, it is merely an observation of how human thought inevitably takes time to  develop. Nor do I mean to suggest that what Aristotle saw was of negligible account. It belongs precisely to what I am calling the order of concretion to begin with the relatively abstract in our understanding of material things, and this is because matter is ordered to form more than vice versa. This can be illustrated in the design of artifacts, for in them also there is always a material and a formal element. Thus, for example, barring special circumstances, one does not ordinarily design a building by first looking at what materials to use; rather one considers what form and function they are to serve, and then one chooses materials accordingly. Though there are circumstantial exceptions to this principle, it remains a principle; and it is clear enough that a systematic disregard of it would make our thought chaotic.

Thus one can see that there is a philosophical justification for doing what Aristotle did. We might describe this justification in another way as well: it derives from the fact that the human mind must bear some proportion to the reality it is to know. For having understood something of the difference between the order of intellect and the order of physical being, we still suppose, rightly, that there must be a proportion between them. Yet this rather abstract statement leaves much in doubt. How is the human mind to fulfill its destiny to know physical reality? I shall trust my readers to be able to understand that the answer to that question could not look the same in the 4th century BC as it looks now….

It is possible that Collins is too generous to Aristotle here, perhaps for the sake of his readers and for the sake of his own intellectual tradition, in the sense that to some extent, it seems likely that some of Aristotle’s conclusions are “impatient” in the way we have discussed earlier. Nonetheless his basic assertion is correct. Knowing the nature of knowledge in detail requires more knowledge of the knowable thing than Aristotle could have had at the time. As Collins says, this is “merely an observation of how human thought inevitably takes time to develop.” And even if there is some intellectual impatience there, there is perhaps no more such impatience than is generally found in those who seek to understand reality.