That Initial Impulse

A common focus among my posts on this blog is that of the need for a ground (or substrate), broadly construed, upon which other concepts or items may be "built". Indeed, the name of this blog itself indicates as much; part of its meaning comes from a statement of Wittgenstein's in On Certainty: "Doubt rests upon that which is beyond doubt."

In epistemology, we want a fundamental, solid basis for knowledge: the indubitable, or the undoubtable. Analogously, in metaphysics, we have the need for something that sit in the spot of "prime mover": an uncaused cause (causa sui), the First Cause, God. In ethics, we need to know what can possibly justify objective moral imperatives when every value judgment is, apparently, subjective. (To refer to this notion of a "first thing" in general, I will use the general term "ultimate ground".)

In a digression, I note that these problems are not what typically occupy philosophers as professionals. I don't mean that the whole of each field in philosophy drives only toward finding an ultimate ground. Rather, while a philosopher's personal sense of ultimate grounds or justifications may be upset when she first begins studying skepticism and/or thinking critically about her own experience, usually this problem is eventually settled or ignored in favor of "higher level" concerns later on. There may be good reason for that: once you cover the basics, is there a lot else to say? And there is certainly no shortage of richer philosophical veins to mine elsewhere, once you accept something as given, like, "We do have knowledge of some sort, even if it is not and cannot be 'perfect'", or "Ethical systems can be evaluated in some kind of objective way", etc. Yes, maybe the skeptics are right that nothing meets their impeccably high standards, but that doesn't suddenly render thought, learning, and acting useless.

My main point--which may end up taking less time to say than the above digression--is that there is an analogous apparent absence within our psyches with respect to personal agency. At least, within my psyche: perhaps the rest of you are different. Anyhow, when I introspect, I notice a distinction between mental activity that feels constitutive of me as an individual person, and that which seems more incidental (or "accidental", if you like). For example, the thoughts I hold now, the ones inspiring these very words, fit the former category. The sensations from external (and some internal) stimuli that I experience at every moment fit the latter category, e.g., my experience of a glowing screen upon which words appear.

Now, the thing that strikes me as highly peculiar is the palpable lack of an ultimate ground in all of this. For incidental experiences, that makes sense: most or all of them originate from outside of me, so I can safely presume that any such ground lies "out there" as well. But when it comes to constitutive (we might also say integral) mental activity, I have a very strong sense of personal agency and thus responsibility; that is to say, I subjectively feel like "I" am the origin of such things. When I make a decision, any kind of conscious decision, I feel like I am a mini prime mover (c.f. Chisholm on free will and unmoved movers). But, in fact, under scrutiny, I can find no ultimate ground within me for decision nor motivation. Even though I feel in control of myself, even though I feel that I am the "first" in a chain of causality or what-have-you, closer inspection reveals no such basis within me.

And that strikes me as unusual.

Inquiry Into Impossibility

(Briefly).

I am a being with desires. Roughly, this means that I, as a sentient system, feel impelled to relieve an urge. So, I create a mental simulation of some thing, some state of affairs that differs from the current state of the world, that I expect (or hope) will alleviate that urge.

A simple example: Debra is hungry. Instinct and memory tell her that moving her body so as to bring comestibles to her mouth and chew (+ swallow, etc.) will make her less hungry. Thus, her object of desire is a state where she has eaten food, or where her stomach is full, or something to that effect.

The fundamental principle, as everyone already knows, is that actions modify our environment, and our bodies consequently reward us – with dopamine and the diminishment of urge – through modifying the environment in particular ways.

What happens, now, if I desire something impossible?

Let me sit and contemplate a bowl of fruit. My desire is for one of the fruit – a mango, perhaps – to be in my hand. I have, then, a clearly defined goal (a simulated aspect of the environment which will sate my want), and all that remains is to use the power of action to translate object of desire into actuality. Common sense says I should move myself within range of the bowl (if I'm not there already), extend an arm, and pick it up. However, my desire is slightly more complex than that: I want to achieve my goal without going through those steps. Part of my envisioned goal includes the condition that I collect the mango in the absence of gross physical movement.

There might be other options: maybe I have a friend (or servant) nearby who will interpret a very slight gesture on my part as a request for the mango. Or maybe there's a mechanical hand and conveyor belt set up that leads directly to my own biological hand, and it is activated through some minute action – moving my eyes or blinking in a particular pattern, for example.

But let's say none of these things have been arranged: the most likely situation is that I'm sitting in place alone, unaided, merely willing the mango to somehow appear in my hand through no great effort of my own.

That this should happen is improbable to the point of impossibility.

So, I review my options: supposing that I stubbornly stick to my original constraints (no gross physical movement), there is little to nothing that I can do to change the situation. To effect change, action is required; and only a particular subset of available actions leads to particular (desired) outcomes. If the set of actions-available-to-me happens to be disjoint to the set of actions-leading-to-my-goal, it seems I am utterly powerless. There must be overlap between those categories, otherwise it is logically impossible for me to achieve my goal through action.

Is there any other way to achieve a goal than through action? By the very nature of the word "achieve", I think the answer is no. Is it possible for me to accomplish something while doing nothing? Pace Laozi, the very idea reeks of contradiction. "But," I protest, "I am doing something – I'm thinking and simulating." The problem is that, apparently, thinking and simulating exert no influence on the universe if they are not accompanied by physical forces to realize their aims. Alone, they do not overlap with very many sets of actions-that-lead-to-goals at all.

How can I shape the universe to match my desires? Only through the channels that the universe allows me. And so the question becomes, how can I change those channels?

Controlling oneself

Fascinating post over at Less Wrong about the influence of control systems on human behavior, and the role they seem to play in the brain. A control system here basically means a feedback device that catalyzes or inhibits some variable in order to maintain it within an accepted range. (Thermostat, homeostasis, etc.)

Here's a lengthy quote that seems most pertinent to me:

In a primitive, tribal culture, being seen as useless to the tribe could easily be a death sentence, so we [likely] evolved mechanisms to avoid giving the impression of being useless. A good way to avoid showing your incompetence is to simply not do the things you're incompetent at, or things which you suspect you might be incompetent at and that have a great associated cost for failure. If it's important for your image within the tribe that you do not fail at something, then you attempt to avoid doing that.

You might already be seeing where this is leading. The things many of us procrastinate on are exactly the kinds of things that are important to us. We're deathly afraid of the consequences of what might happen if we fail at them, so there are powerful forces in play trying to make us not work on them at all. Unfortunately, for beings living in modern society, this behavior is maladaptive and buggy. It leads to us having control circuits which try to keep us unproductive, and when they pick up on things that might make us more productive, they start suppressing our use of those techniques.

Furthermore, the control circuits are stupid. They are occasionally capable of being somewhat predictive, but they are fundamentally just doing some simple pattern-matching, oblivious to deeper subtleties. They may end up reacting to wholly wrong inputs. Consider the example of developing a phobia for a particular place, or a particular kind of environment. Something very bad happens to you in that place once, and as a result, a circuit is formed in your brain that's designed to keep you out of such situations in the future. Whenever it detects that you are in a place resembling the one where the incident happened, it starts sending error signals to get you away from there. Only that this is a very crude and unoptimal way of keeping you out of trouble - if a car hit you while you were crossing the road, you might develop a phobia for crossing the road. Needless to say, this is more trouble than it's worth.

(P.S., I should note that the author of the quoted blog post, Kaj_Sotala, draws this conceptual material largely from a self-help article by PJ Eby).

Fascinating stuff. Maybe not without its problems though, as commenter Silas Barta notes:

The explanations here for behavioral phenomena look like commonsense reasoning that is being shoehorned into controls terminology by clever relabeling. (ETA: Why do you need the concept of a "feedback control system" to think of the idea of running through the reasons you're afraid of something, for example?)

The thought concerns me a bit too. Are we really getting any benefit from describing these aspects of behavior as control mechanisms? Are we getting a more accurate model of behavior? At an individual, practical level, does it help us to conceive of our thought processes in this way?

Want? Choice?

Why is it so hard to be a particular way by choice?

Why is it that I cannot simply decide one day, hey, I want to accomplish X--and then pursue it?

Nothing prevents me.

Akrasia...?

Will, Belief, Experience

Do we consciously choose what to believe?

It seems to me that I cannot choose to disbelieve that the world exists, in the same way that I cannot disbelieve that my throat is sore (at this moment, it actually is sore). There's something about the immediate presence of certain stimuli and observations that seems to force states of mind upon me, states which dictate that "things are a particular way".

Now, I can sort of construct an artificial barrier between myself and the belief. I can do some dialectical footwork to maybe convince myself that what I'm thinking of as "being sore" really isn't. Or maybe my throat (or my conscious self at all) doesn't exist, so there's nothing to be sore. Or, maybe, I can detach myself slightly from the experience: focus on other things or meditate on the painful sensation in such a way as to attenuate its sting.

But I can't seem to rid myself of this persistent belief that there is something painful I am experiencing. I can't simply decide, "I no longer believe that it hurts when I swallow"--because somehow all that I feel at a given moment conspires to reject that belief as untenable? ... Or something?

Maybe it's not "belief" that I'm talking about. Maybe it's a primal awareness, and I'm simply attributing implicit "beliefs" to any states of awareness at all. But okay then, does that mean when I decide, "My throat no longer hurts", I really do now believe that my throat doesn't hurt, in spite of the continued discomfort I feel? That seems obviously wrong, somehow.

Probably, I can't convince myself that there is no table in front of me (unless I have good reason to believe that it's an illusion). I can try, and I can reach forward as though to swipe my hand clear through the illusory table without resistance. But I will be lying to myself as I do so, because I will know (or at least strongly believe), in some sense, that my hand will in fact meet resistance.

Really, all I'm doing is convincing the conversational (logical?) part of my mind, whereas the neuro-hardware that processes these things remains unconvinced. Probably it needs other triggers.

Can I look down at a patch of grass and convince myself that I'm looking at trees and vegetation from two miles up, thus inducing vertigo?

How is it that being told "X was just in this room" can elicit such an emotional response in me, whereas simply thinking "X was just in this room" in isolation, when I have no good reason to actually believe it was true, elicits nothing? Why can't I manufacture conviction artificially?


{Is there a connection between sanity and "proper" beliefs?}


Beliefs like, "The world is round/flat" and "God does (not) exist". For these propositions, I don't see anything which sticks out so obviously as a barrier toward changing belief; they're much too abstract. Maybe I really can change these through will alone. But in these cases, there's still a corpus of other beliefs and actions which conflict with my supposed espousal of a contrary belief: I can declare "I was an atheist just one moment, but now I fervently believe in the Judeo-Christian God", yet I won't really accept or embrace that conclusion. I won't feel the truth of it, yet I will feel like a duplicitous moron when praying or trying to act as though God really did exist.

Is, then, a vital component of belief feeling? The experience of certainty?