Imagination

It may be that sheep lack imagination. I rather doubt that they dream of fields of orange grass, or of a retirement when their grazing days are behind them. To be honest, I can't really begin to imagine what being a sheep is like. I can imagine being outdoors in all weathers, in a fleecy coat. I can imagine waking up to a field full of breakfast, lunch and dinner. I can imagine sniffing out a balanced combination of vegetation, not really being aware of what my taste aspirations are, and being wholly unaware of the concept of nutritional requirements. But all this is no more than a projection of my self into sheepdom. I suspect that sheep have very little imagination; and it is entirely lacking the linguistic conceptual structure that my imaginings seem to have.

There are times, however, when I feel that I have the imagination of a sheep. I imagine myself standing before a moderately well-stocked fridge. Maybe a little cheese or a slice of ham? Orange juice, perhaps? Or yogurt? I am not aware of the idea of hunger, or appetite; but I hear the fridge calling me. Now it may be that I answer the call, and as I enter the kitchen, perhaps the kettle intrudes on my consciousness, or some form of awareness, and magnetises my hand. There is a pattern of force-fields: my empty hand is attracted to the kettle; empty kettle and I are attracted to tap; full kettle and I are attracted to stove; kettle on stove repels me towards teapot; teapot and I are attracted to tea; teapot, tea and I are attracted to stove; teapot on stove repels me towards mugs; mug and I are attracted to fridge.

So I am standing before a moderately well-stocked fridge. The idea of milk is perhaps uppermost in my mind. But what other ideas linger there? The idea of a little cheese or a slice of ham? Orange juice, perhaps? Or yogurt? I remember a younger, slimmer body that I used to call my own. I remember the taste of tea with skimmed milk. And my hand is resting on the semi-skimmed. Is there a growing sense of definitive decision in my mind, linked to the sound of the kettle? Do I imagine the cold air flowing out of the fridge, pulling in electricity behind it, to which is attached a little cash and a dollop of carbon dioxide? What, really, is the function of mayonnaise?

None of this is real. The sun is shining and I have seeds to sow. Now where would those seeds be, do you imagine? Somewhere cool and dark and safe from vermin. That's right: on the top shelf of the door of the fridge...

Sheep

This morning I looked out of the window at the sheep grazing the hillside. Or: I looked out at the hillside, and noticed the sheep grazing it. Either way, I noticed that they were all facing in the same direction, on a seemingly perfect alignment. It being sunny at the time, with a stiff cool breeze, I wondered whether the sheep were maximising warmth from the sun, or minimising chill from the wind. And as I observed them stepping quite casually forward as they grazed, I wondered what it felt like to think like a sheep.

There appear to be a number of forces acting upon the sheep brain: the wind, the sun, the topology, the vegetation, and other sheep (this being England, predators are not a concern, but presumably the sheep retain some "anxiety" on that front too). Somehow, this combination of factors was acting on the individual sheep to account for their distribution across the hillside and their common alignment. Later it clouded over and then, though I missed the moment of transformation, I noticed that the common alignment had gone. So it seems reasonable to conclude that the direction of the sun was the dominant factor: the sheep felt more comfortable with the sunshine on their flanks, although this does not explain why they were all facing in the same direction. Perhaps the wind was decisive here.

Google is a wonderful thing. A search for "sheep grazing simulation" turns up a number of no doubt fascinating accounts of research into this subject. Being something of a virtual sheep, though, I find myself disinclined to graze this particular virtual pasture. It reminds me of a story last year about geomagnetic cows, apparently confirmed by reviews of Google Earth pictures. Perhaps, in fact, the grazers are heliotropic and the timing of the "observations" is skewed towards midday, when images with less shadow can be obtained: in late morning and early afternoon, a north-south alignment might make more "sense" (to a grazer) than the east-west alignment they might "prefer" in the early morning and late afternoon.

This may seem like idle thought or vain speculation. In fact, its significance, for me, is as a metaphor for thinking and planning. The sheep, without a discussion of who will feed where and when, on what, facing in which direction, individually act so as to achieve their "purpose", as a flock, of feeding efficiently on the available vegetation. Perhaps sheep society is more egalitarian than human society, and if sheep have a mental model of their fellows' behaviour based on their own (which I doubt), it is likely to be more accurate than the human equivalent. And perhaps if we spent more time thinking about sheep, we might learn the secrets of their success!

Reflection

The chances are, if you're reading this, that you, like me, are one of the most fortunate people who ever lived. In material terms, you're better off than almost anyone who lived more than a century ago: not quite so much precious metal or land, perhaps, but better quality food in excessive quantities; a more comfortable bed; enough drinking water to swim in; more clean clothes than you know what to do with; books, music and other entertainments to occupy you for weeks, months or years; the whole internet to browse; most of the world reachable within 24 hours and almost instantaneous communication with almost everyone you know; good health or support for your infirmities; educated and a skilled user of the most powerful communication tool known to man, the English language...

But this isn't an exercise in counting your blessings. The question is: where does your discontent come from? I'm tempted to suppose that it is ultimately true that we are never satisfied. But why? Because we have an in-built appetite for improving our situation. When we evolved, there was no advantage to limiting this appetite; only recently (in evolutionary terms) has it started to kill us.

Of course, we can transcend this instinct: decide to seek more balance in our lives, a different kind of fulfilment (ponder that word). But there's a problem: the appetite doesn't go away. Whatever you do, this appetite will not go away. And if you master it or ignore it, it is liable to find an expression, possibly a neurotic or psychotic one!

That's not a very upbeat point at which to conclude. And a more positive perspective on this appetite is to give it its traditional name: hope. Hope is the instinctual belief that one's situation can improve, where "improve" means that the distance between the actual and desired situation is reduced. A change in perspective is required as this gap gets smaller. We need to focus less on the gap and more on the proximity. That is, we need to avoid accidentally taking two steps back to move one step forward. And we need to recall the greatest truth: the desire too can change, though it cannot simply be denied.

Decision

Recently, Dr Luke Houghton put up some posts on decision-making and biases. For one reason or another, it has taken me some time to get round to reflecting on these. Let's begin, as Dr Houghton does, by asking What are decisions.

First of all, I distinguish between the active process of making a decision and the results of the process. So really, I'm talking about "deciding". Secondly, the process of deciding is one that I consider as a pure thinking process. That is, as interesting a topic as "collective decision making" may be, I view that as a social context for individual decisions; broadly, collective "decisions" are agreements about the relative importance of individual decisions. The result of these circumscriptions is that deciding is viewed as a subset of thinking.

Technically, this allows for the possibility that deciding and thinking are one and the same, so we need to be clearer about what sort of thinking can be classed as deciding. There is, in fact, a simple characteristic of all decisions that we can propose as a defining characteristic: the reduction in the number of potential or contemplated outcomes. To break this down further, decisions are forward-looking (to be contrasted with memory, for example) and "selective" (to be contrasted with "productive" or "creative" operations, such as imagination). To be clear, though, when we make decisions we may, and often should, do so in the context of a wider process which includes productive operations (increasing the options being considered); but these productive operations are not part of the actual process of deciding. (It is also possible to make decisions about the past, but these are still "forward-looking" since they are in fact decisions about how the past will be viewed from that point onwards.)

Now Dr Houghton claims that we make decisions to solve problems, so he may be working with a much tighter definition of decision. In my view, deciding is a core sub-process of thinking. It almost seems inappropriate to classify a process as "thinking" if there is no "deciding" involved. The eye cannot see without sense-making "decisions" about what is being perceived, for example. And a purely productive process such as brainstorming has no utility without a subsequent process involving decisions about what is valuable. So, in my view, "decision" is best viewed as an essential component of intelligence. And it is for this reason that the thinking person comes with an in-built faculty for deciding. Or, to put it less emotively, thinking demands some limiting mechanism(s) to prevent an infinitude of alternative interpretations or potential outcomes. "Decision" is the term used for most limiting mechanisms. Some limiting mechanisms that I would not class as "decisions" are random and programmatic: essentially, where the reasons behind the limitation have no reference to the substance of what is selected for or against.

So..."decision" is a thinking process that limits the substance of thought by reference to that substance. I have been careful here to avoid the conclusion that "decision" is conscious or considered, not least because we have yet to explore these ideas. It seems to me that the various "flaws" in making decisions are generally the unfortunate result of more generally useful processes, just as optical illusions are produced by the operation of generally useful visual and perceptive processes. But the proper time to consider these "biases" (as Dr Houghton terms them) is after we have developed a coherent picture of "decisive processes", which will be the topic of a later post.

The Thinking System

From the start, I have referred to thinking as a process. One problem with this position is that it conceals the complexity of "the process". We may think in terms of a series of simple steps that could be summarised quite neatly. That is what we tend to do with processes: reduce them to a series of steps, or sub-processes.

If thinking is a process, the nature of the process as experienced in human beings, might usefully be described as "filthy". That is, it resists analysis because the interesting sub-processes interact in a non-sequential and self-referential fashion.

So, when I refer to the storyteller and the rationalising process, it is deeply metaphorical. The story is composed from plot ideas, influenced by prejudice and perception, altered by visualisations and linguistic choices, filtered through coherency and plausibility tests, adjusted in the light of imagined and dimly apprehended audience reaction...

We can begin to make sense of this confusion by considering thinking as a complex system. We may consider thinking in human beings as being activity in the brain, occurring at two fundamentally different levels. At the base "hardware" level, we have neurons "firing". There is a whole host of physiological activity surrounding this reasonably elementary process, which is how drugs affect our way of thinking. At the more conceptual level, which is at least conceivable as a system that might have an alternative implementation, are the processes I would refer to as thinking.

In the context of storytelling, a key sub-process is the tendency to create sequential associations. If you are presented with a number of different pictures, for example, such as you might find in a comic strip, but not in a particular order, you will (if you are "normal") generate one or more plausible sequences for the images. This is (probably) not because you are used to receiving jumbled sets of images and being asked to sequence them. It is because that is what your brain naturally does, all the time, in many different ways. In short, the brain tends to impose sequence. And it does so, I presume, because its environment, the world, appears to operate in this fashion. "Effect(s)" follow(s) "cause(s)". Of course, the belief in a causal relationship is a mildly special case of the sequential association, logically. But the default position, I venture to suggest, is that associations are both sequential and causal.

At the heart of the storytelling process, then, is a tendency to associate sequentially, and a default belief in a causal relationship. We can occasionally glimpse this process at work in waking dreams. These are dreams we "recall" on being awoken by some external stimulus. Often, such dreams seem to have their culmination woven into the very fabric of the dream's plot, as if no other outcome would make sense. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that the stimulus occurs first and the sequential narrative of the dream is instantaneously assembled from the pre-existing concepts in the brain being associated with the causally unrelated stimulus. And one reason why such dreams seem particularly vivid may be that the "recall" is, in fact, a glimpse of the actual process of generating a sequential narrative from the unrelated concepts, rather than an act of remembering.

The storyteller and the dreamer are one and the same.

The Rational and the Rationalised

One of the most remarkable series of experiments in neuroscience involves people whose corpus callosum has been severed. In these people, the two hemispheres of the brain do not communicate with each other. This allows researchers to test some theories about brain organisation. What they have found is that messages directed to the right hemisphere can remain unperceived by the left hemisphere. The human being can respond to the messages without the verbalising part of the brain, in the left hemisphere, being able to articulate the reason for the response, since it is unaware of the prompt. But here's the thing. Although the left hemisphere is wholly unaware of the prompt, it is totally convinced that it does know the reason for the action. Very plausible and coherent explanations are put forward. These are, an objective observer may conclude, complete fabrications. But apart from the existence of a secret truth known only to to the researchers and their subject's right hemisphere, the situation appears little different from any normal case where explanations for actions are offered.

The obvious conclusion, it seems to me, is that the verbalising left hemisphere generally seeks to integrate our actions into a coherent narrative. I simply refer to this automatic process as "the storyteller". The storyteller weaves perceptions of the world, pre-existing concepts and recently apprehended ideas into the story it is continuously telling, whilst we are conscious. In other words, we make it all up as we go along! The belief that we acted for particular reasons is persistent, perfectly plausible, but ultimately delusional.

Now, we should not conclude from this that our decisions are never rational. All we should conclude is that no matter how rational our decisions seem to be, our conviction that they are rational comes from the plausibility of our storyteller. In other words, decisions may sometimes be somewhat rational, but they are always rationalised.

Concepts

Dr Luke Houghton is at it again, wondering whether a change of concept is as good as a holiday? My immediate response is that a holiday is only as good as its changes to concepts!

What do we mean by "concept", here? Dr Houghton talks about Peter Checkland's definition: "a framework of ideas". But the simple fact is that ideas do not exist, as such. Ideas are abstractions from concepts, rather than concepts being compositions of ideas. If we think about a chair, we may think about a particular chair or about the abstract concept of a chair. In either case, our chair exists in our thoughts not in isolation, but in conjunction with other ideas, such as sitting, dining, reading, interior design, manufacturing, other chairs, memories involving chairs, dreams of chairs, fantasies about chairs, the Freudian interpretation of the chair symbol, stools, benches, sofas, rocks, tree-trunks... There is no end to the framework of ideas!

The essence of a chair, if we may talk about such a thing, is an abstraction that each of us has developed separately from our many real and imagined interactions with chairs. And this (mutatis mutandis) is true of all our ideas and concepts. Even our ideas about and concepts of ideas and concepts. Life is about developing concepts, either adding new layers to our existing concepts, or challenging them.

Which brings us to holidays. An important part of the abstract concept of a holiday is change. Rest and enjoyment are other important parts, but change is of the essence. By putting yourself into a different relationship with the world, you challenge your prevailing system of concepts. You see yourself not as local, resident, employed, but as global, visitor, at leisure. And from these changes in perspective come changes in the theories you have about the world and your place in it.

But while a holiday would not be much of a holiday without conceptual change, conceptual change is perfectly possible without a holiday (indeed, it is inevitable). The wisdom we recognise in "a change is as good as a rest", though, is that our prevailing system of concepts can become so oppressive that we need relief from it. And we know that making changes to our current situation can lead to just such relief. The important point is that it is the relief we value, whether it is the result of change or rest. And the relief is always only ever a change in the prevailing system of concepts.

What is less generally appreciated is that there is no need for physical change or rest, for this relief to be experienced. It's just that we have a tendency to keep running along on the same mental tracks unless we are derailed. We don't have to, but we almost certainly will; it's the way we're made. So, we can take a holiday, we can do something different, or we can just change our minds. At times of stress, knowing how to jump the mental tracks without, as it were, losing the plot, is what preserves the essence of The Thinking Person.