Structure and Interpretation of Human Minds

In an earlier post, I explained that cognition is best understood as interaction between mental processes. Here, I explain the nature of some of those higher-level mental processes and the interaction and relationships among them. Some of those explanations are, in many ways, simply rewording of some obvious things we already know about the human mind. Others are speculative hypotheses.

Before discussing how the human mind works, we can consider what it must do. Here are some broader classes of computational tasks that our mind performs:

• Modeling natural phenomena - the mind must model the physical world.


• Modeling social phenomena - the mind must model the social structure, including self, others and any interaction amongst them.


• Establish preferences and actions to perform - the mind must somehow learn to know what to like, what not to like, what to do and what not to do.


• Allocate resources among various processes - the mind must allocate its limited resources using some control structure At any point in time, there are many things we want to do that cannot be performed simultaneously - the mind must prioritize between these tasks. Furthermore, the mind must decide what to think about, as well as what to pay attention to.

Of those computational tasks, modeling of the social structure and resource allocation using a control structure are intertwined in an interesting way. Undoubtedly, one's comprehension of the social structure must be taken into account in the way the mind prioritizes the tasks. For example, consider a soldier. The military command hierarchy largely dictates the decisions he makes. He may have his own preferences regarding what to do, but when he receives an order from his superior, that is what he must do - it overrides his other personal preferences. While it's tempting to use a generic decision-making framework where the mind does a global cost-benefit analysis before making decisions, soldiers obeying orders do not first question orders, evaluate the pros and cons and act accordingly - they instinctively obey orders. Remember that whether to do a cost-benefit analysis itself is a decision, as well as deciding how much time and cognitive resoures to spend on the analysis. But many decisions must be made in real time - a soldier must choose between retreating and saving a comrade's life and may not have more than a fraction of a second to decide. By the same token, we follow social conventions every second of our life, without having the luxury to question or scrutinze individual decisions. When a mother with two kids gets on a subway train, she has to balance her own needs with the kids' needs and other passengers' needs. She must pay attention to many things, including potential threats and her kids' behavior.

While in the soldier example, the control structure is about doing what one is told, the control structure here is much more nuanced - it's about attention and more subtle social obligations. The mother knows what her obligations, to herself, her kids and other passengers, as dictated by the social structure are and her attentional resources are divided accordingly. Should any emergency or any other situations requiring decisions arise, she'll know what to do - there would no particular need for her to perform a cost-benefit analysis. Notice, for instance, that when you're on a train (and are not the mother), you also pay more attention to the kids than to adults. In fact, one would notice that the amount of positive attention you pay to someone is (let's ignore for time being how we can't help but pay attention to homeless people who smell and other factors that demand our attention) highly correlated with the degree to which you would be socially obligated to help the person in an emergency.

So what does this all mean? The control structure is some sort of a global process. Our mental representation of the social structure, likewise, is a group of interacting processes. We must model each person in our social network, consider the relationship between the person and self and the variety of rules, written, unwritten, real and imaginary by which this relationship is governed. To the extent that the control structure, even at the most subtle level, takes into account this social structure, the group of interacting processes that model the social structure effectively controls the control structure, which is another way of saying that those processes form part of the control structure (control over control is control). Thus, the processes that model the social structure (with all the subtle social rules that detail our obligations under a variety of scenarios, many of which never come to pass) partially governs the mind. Thus, in this sense, the mind's internal system of control, mirrors the subtle control structure inherent in the society's rules and obligations.

Where does the rest of the control come from? Self, of course. Everyone has basic needs and desires. Though many things that we think of as our own desires are a combination of our desires and social conventions. We don't generally desire nice clothes for ourselves at first - we want to look nice to others. This is where preference learning comes from - not only are we explicitly influenced by what we've learned as other's preferences and take those into account, we learn to incorporate those preferences as our own. Over time, means become an end. Note that this preference learning process is effectively a form of precomputation (though all learning, on some level is). By incorporating what others want and wanting it yourself, you can skip the process of having to model. At the same time, complex behavior cannot easily be modeled as preferences. In fact, even something as simple as eating vegetables, which should be modelable as such, often isn't. Many carry an aversion to healthy foods well into their adult life and learn to eat vegetables not as a matter of preference for its taste, but as some sort of obligation to self.

Thus precomputation of socially desirable behavior as preference has limits - this does not mean that other forms of precomputation aren't possible. As mentioned before, we often tend to just know what to do in fairly novel situations that we've never been in before. It can also be critical for the mind to partially precompute decisions that need to be made under infrequent emergencies - those are the precise situations where one can't afford to leisurely consider various possibilities. This is where our modeling of natural phenomena and social phenomena comes in - in order for us to quickly respond in situations of importance, we're constantly using our models of reality to simulate reality (this encompasses imagining, daydreaming, nightdreaming and plain-old thinking - it can be done consciously or not, while sleeping or awake) in our mind. This computation can be seen as training of the control structure using the model of social and natural reality, but it can also be see as training of all of those. Some faults or incongruity in our understanding of reality can certainly be resolved by elaborate simulations.

All of this suggests some kind of correspondence between the structure of a society and the structure of a mind. To the extent that we simulate the social reality in our mind to make decisions, the social reality, or at least some virtual model thereof, drives our decision making proces - in fact this simulation process is largely the hypothetical control structure we were speaking of earlier. Furthermore, the feedback goes back the other way - to the extent that we, then, interact with others using results derived from our model, social interaction is borne out of our mental model of social reality.

On some level, everything in this post is a fairly obvious observation regarding our mind presented in a somewhat unconventional framework. Yet, this correspondence between society and mind has profound implications regarding our ability to study the human mind as a computational system. It's difficult to study how a mind functions because we have no inherent ability to interpret what's going on inside. As argued here before, neurological studies tend to be fruitless in understanding higher level functions because there are simply too many abstraction layers. However, understanding the nature of correspondence between a social structure and a mind may allow us to see, on a higher level, how the mind functions internally - after all we can directly observe many aspects of social interaction. Furthermore, we can apply some principles of computation, especially with the understanding that the system must have evolved and with some guesses regarding specific selective pressures it evolved under.

For instance, because the process of reality simulation is crucial to the control structure, we seem to use it not merely to simulate possible realities, but rather to manipulate the process itself to get ourselves to do things that some part of our mind thinks is a good idea. One good example is that some people imagine their deceased parents when they want to do the right thing. It's not that their deceased parents are a relevant part of social reality but rather that thinking of them is a way the mind came up to help make certain decisions. This sort of exaptation, where features that evolved for one reason are co-opted for another, is a common theme in evolution. My hypothesis is that many goal-driven processes in our mind (any desires, wants, etc) are constantly hijacking this largely subconscious reality simulation process in order to pursue their own agenda. Once the reality simulation becomes an important part of the decision making process, this sort of hijacking is nearly inevitable. Thus the reality simulation process, which can be seen as a complex network of processes that represent elements of social reality (such as mental model of others that are socially relevant) must also deal with various mental processes that aren't necessarily modeling any external reality, but rather elements of desires. This answers a question from earlier: how do we balance the needs of self with the needs of others? - we allow the needs of self to hijack our model of how we should behave. This is why, despite being incredibly social aware, we're still a bit self-centered - if there was no such hijacking, we'd perceive reality in a neutral way and act as though our needs were no more important than those of others.

This hijacking also explains the phenomenon of wishful thinking - if wishes or desires are hijacking the process of simulating reality which helps us clarify what reality is, it's no surprise that some aspect of what we want appears to be part of reality, because we can't necessarily figure out whether something appears in the simulation because it's an aspect of reality or because it was inserted by our desires.

It appears, then, that we're powerless against our own desires manipulating this reality simulation process. But we already have methods for dealing with other processes. If we can imagine our mother telling us what to do in this reality simulation process, we also need to, if necessary, tell her, hopefully in some polite way, to shut up so that we can do other things instead. How we imagine we would interact with others in this reality simulation process is how we govern mental processes representing our models of others. It's imagination in the sense that you're not actually interacting with others, but it's real in the sense that you're actually interacting with those mental processes. Of course, this general methodology cannot be too far from how you interact with others, because if that's the case, you're no longer simulating reality, but fantasies. While some fantasies may be mentally healthy, we do need to model at least some part of reality to make reasonable decisions. Anyway, when the desires intrude upon this reality simulation process, we are likely to use a mechanism we already have to govern them - the same used for governing mental processes representing others. Thus how we govern our mind, all those conflicting desires and wants, is largely reflective of how we imagine we would govern others, which in turn reflects how we actually interact with others. This neatly explains megalomania - governing your own desires is genuinely difficult and one way to do it is by giving a lot of power to self in the reality simulation process. Unfortunately, while this can be useful for governing inner desires, it necessarily leads to a distorted view of self in relations to others and affects social interactions accordingly.