Author kevinbinz

An Introduction To The Attentional Spotlight

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Part Of: Attention sequence
Content Summary: 800 words, 8 min read

No one denies attention is intimately related to consciousness.  But how much do you know about attention? Does it feel like a synonym for consciousness?

Today, we will be learning about some interesting software suspended above your perceptual systems: the attentional spotlight.

Foveal Vision and Saccades

To understand visual attention, I first need to tell you about vision.

Your eyes contain rods & cones. Rods detect light intensity, cones detect light color. 

Rods and cones are not distributed evenly. Cones live right behind your pupils, rods live everywhere else.

Attention- Foveal Vision (Distribution Of Rods-Cones)

As this graph makes clear, there are two different types of vision:

  • Foveal Vision, located at the center of your field of vision. This system collects detailed information about an object, including the color.
  • Peripheral Vision, located at, well, the periphery. This system computes the “gist” of a scene, and detects movement.

Why is there a hole in the above pictures? This blind spot is due to your optic nerve intruding on your retina. Natural selection can sometimes design itself into a corner. Animals inhabiting different evolutionary lineages, such as octopi, do not suffer this problem.

Foveal vision is very narrow. In order to get more detail, your eyes have to move. Specifically, your foveal spotlight needs to travel from point to point, slowly adding detail to your understanding of a scene.

Such eye movements are known as saccades.  Saccades usually operate subconsciously.  With modern imaging technology, we can graph precisely how your eyes move over an image. Consider, for example, a saccade trace over the following portrait:

Attention- Saccades

Why are saccades drawn to the eyes? Let me answer that question a bit later.

Let’s return to the question of (foveal) color vision. I’ve shown you two distinct features in this system:

  • Foveal Spotlight: only objects in the very center of your vision are in clear focus.
  • Blind Spot: you are literally blind in one particular spot in your field of vision. (If you like, you can prove this to yourself).

Crucially, neither the spotlight nor the blind spot enter conscious awareness:

Attention- Foveal Vision (Lena Example)

This is a bit unsettling. We literally see less than we think. Somewhere between perception and the Mental Movie, our brains inject an illusion of transparency.  Such “false wholeness” effects should give us pause.

Overt vs Covert Attention

We can now explain visual attention! 🙂 Suppose I give you the above picture and say, “pay attention to the shape of her nose”. How do you respond?

Your eyes would most likely trace a saccade until your foveal spotlight was centered above her nose. A detailed image of her nose would then probably appear in your Mental Movie. Are we done? Is this an adequate description of the biology of attention?

Before declaring victory, consider sound. Imagine deciding to pay attention to the cello section of an orchestra. Is there an acoustic equivalent of a saccade, through which your body can amplify this particular frequency? Absolutely not. (Tilting your head won’t work, because that addresses your ability to detect directional sound).

Another counterexample comes from proprioception, the sense of the orientation of your limbs (as reported by nerves in your muscles). Here too, there is no way your body to “zoom in” on any limb. Yet it is possible to hold specific body parts in the center of your conscious experience.

Thus, attention doesn’t require assistance from mechanisms like saccades. The attentional spotlight is thoroughly independent. We can call unassisted cases of attention (e.g., sound) covert attention, and “enhanced” versions of attention (e.g., vision) overt attention.

This approach is confirmed by a careful study of visual experience. The foveal spotlight and the attentional spotlight can come apart. While these two spotlights often converge, sometimes they attentional spotlight will broadcast the contents of peripheral vision (as any driver can attest). Inattentional blindness is another striking example of the two spotlights diverging: even surprising stuff – like a gorilla – can escape detection, despite their placement within the foveal spotlight.

Attention- Foveal Vs Attentional Spotlight (Lena and Gorilla) (1)

We can now improve our understanding of overt attention. In vision, overt attention moves the foveal spotlight (“green flashlight”) so that it follows the attentional spotlight (“orange flashlight”). In this ways, your eyes seek to “enhance” your conscious experience by feeding it more detail.

Takeaways

  • Foveal and peripheral vision create detailed and coarse descriptions, respectively.
  • Your vision system have two flaws: a blind spot, and a narrow foveal spotlight. 
  • Attention is also a spotlight, delivering a subset of experience to the Mental Movie.
  • Often, the attentional spotlight moves on its own (covert attention).
  • Sometimes, the attentional spotlight is amplified by e.g., saccades (overt attention).
  • Inattentional blindness shows how the foveal spotlight separates from the attentional spotlight.

Next time, we will examine how visual attention relates to consciousness.

[Sequence] Demystifying Consciousness

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Core Sequence

Neurobiology

Selfhood Sequence

Attention sequence

Sleep sequence

Philosophy of Consciousness:

Older Content

Can Consciousness Be Explained?

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Part Of: Demystifying Consciousness sequence
Content Summary: 1000 words, 10 min read

Debates about consciousness are as old as Western Civilization itself. Here, we survey 2000 years of intellectual history in 1000 words. 🙂 Wish me luck!

Movie and Subject

We begin with what consciousness is not.

  • Consciousness is not mind. Consciousness is part of mind, but mind including many other algorithms which operate outside of consciousness.
  • Consciousness is not conscience. Our moral circuitry does it computations elsewhere.

Let me instead put forward a metaphor. Consciousness feels like the movies. More specifically, it comprises:

  1. The Mental Movie. What is the content of the movie? It includes data captured by your eyes, ears, and other senses.
  2. The Mental Subject. Who watches the movie? Only one person, with your goals and your memories – you!

On this view, to explain consciousness one must explain the origins, mechanics, and output of both Movie and Subject.

It would be easy to get such a theory wrong. If we aren’t careful, our metaphor for consciousness might start to look like this:

Consciousness- Cartesian Theater

But this literal interpretation (the Cartesian Theater) is nonsensical: if some person truly was watching the Mental Movie, where does its consciousness come from? 

Thus, on pain of infinite regression, a theory of consciousness must ensure that the Subject is itself unconscious.

Phenomenal Consciousness

But how could scientists possibly hope to produce such a theory? After all, science is in the business of explaining publicly accessible data. But consciousness is private!

Let’s be specific. Recall your experiences of color. Every photon has a wavelength. Now, suppose you see a flashlight producing light of 700 nanometers. Two things happen:

  1. You experiences the distinctive color of red.
  2. You can truthfully report that “that light beam is red”.

Take a moment to recall how this second ability comes from. In infancy, red light presents itself frequently. The infant brain slowly consolidates these redundant sensations into a single concept RED within semantic memory. RED also contains facts about apples, strawberries, and the sunset. Later, as Word Comprehension software comes online, the word “red” (and its accompanying audio signature) are bound into RED to enable communicating with other people.

Consciousness- Qualia Of Color

But let’s imagine your friend has some kind of strange mental disorder which “inverts” all the colors of her mental movie. The experience of red to her feels like the experience of violet to us. How would she tell us about her condition?

If you take a moment to chew on this hypothetical, a truly frightening outcome comes into view. Your friend could never learn she has a disorder. In childhood, she would acquire the exact same facts about 700 nm light, and learn the same word to denote this sense data. She would be in full agreement with her peers when they say, for example, “that apple is red”. She would pass any color test. And yet, something unsettling remains…

Consciousness- Qualia Inversion (1)

Concepts like RED are studied by computer scientists all the time. But, at least in our thought experiment, the experience of red feels private, even untestable.

The experience of red is known as a quale, and learning more about qualia is one of the central occupations of philosophers of mind. The subject is put most forcefully in David Chalmer’s Conscious Mind, where he coins the phrase The Hard Problem. Indeed, it is hard to see how someone could go about even beginning to construct an solution.

Let’s call this experiential view of consciousness, phenomenal consciousness.

Access Consciousness

Let me now introduce another key figure in philosophy of mind: the philosophical zombie (p-zombie). Imagine one of your friends wakes up and, while behaving exactly as they would have before. If asked, your friend would still claim to feel the same etc, but his experience would be… well, he would have NO experiences.

Now, is such a thing possible? To answer, it helps to distinguish between two kinds of possibility:

  • Nomological Possibility: is X possible in our universe with our universe, our idiosyncratic particle soup?
  • Metaphysical Possibility: could X be possible in some universe with some completely alien laws of physics?

If p-zombies are nomologically possible, if a pill for behavior-neutral quale removal could be synthesized, then perhaps we pay ought to give credence to solipsism (“what if I am the only conscious being in the whole world”) and substance dualism (“what if my soul just floats over my body, choosing to reflect its states by magic”).

But, while p-zombies may be metaphysically possible, they are not nomologically possible. Consciousness is an adaptation: neurons and qualia are causally interwoven, and you cannot remove consciousness without crippling an organism. 

The remainder of this sequence will focus on making good on the last sentence. In the meantime, let’s give this functional interpretation of consciousness a name: access consciousness.

Retiring Armchair Philosophy

To sum up, we have identified two different views of consciousness:

  1. Phenomenal consciousness, which focuses on experience.
  2. Access consciousness, which focuses on causal signature.

While philosophical debate surrounding the former has consumed millenia, scientific research into the latter is only a few centuries old. Plainly stated, the science of consciousness has been making huge strides in recent decades, and I intend to share its results.

It is my view that conceptual analysis – armchair philosophy – can only get you so far. The empirically informed will inherit the earth. We live in the age of the neural correlates of consciousness, an age where polymaths weave together seemingly disparate theories into architectures, which tower above the speculations of their ancestors. 

This sequence presents a solution to access consciousness. Its cognitive structure will provide tools for reasoning about phenomenal consciousness.Like most of my writing, its contents are not uniquely my own. In fact, this sequence’s main purpose is to sketch an emerging consensus.

Until next time.

[Excerpt] An Unfortunate Dualist

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Part Of: Philosophy of Mind sequence
Content Summary: 500 words, 5 min read

Once upon a time there was a dualist. He believed that mind and matter are separate substances. Just how they interacted he did not pretend to know-this was one of the “mysteries” of life. But he was sure they were quite separate substances.

This dualist, unfortunately, led an unbearably painful life – not because of his philosophical beliefs, but for quite different reasons. And he had excellent empirical evidence that no respite was in sight for the rest of his life. He longed for nothing more than to die. But he was deterred from suicide by such reasons as:

  1. he did not want to hurt other people by his death;
  2. he was afraid suicide might be morally wrong;
  3. he was afraid there might be an afterlife, and he did not want to risk the possibility of eternal punishment.

So our poor dualist was quite desperate.

Then came the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed him.

Do you believe that such a drug is impossible in principle? Assuming you believe it possible, would you take it? Would you regard it as immoral? Is it tantamount to suicide? Is there anything in Scriptures forbidding the use of such a drug? Surely, the body of the taker can still fulfill all its responsibilities on earth. Another question: Suppose your spouse took such a drug, and you knew it. You would know that she (or he) no longer had a soul but acted just as if she did have one. Would you love your mate any less?

To return to the story, our dualist was, of course, delighted! Now he could annihilate himself (his soul, that is) in a way not subject to any of the foregoing objections. And so, for the first time in years, he went to bed with a light heart, saying: “Tomorrow morning I will go down to the drugstore and get the drug. My days of suffering are over at last!” With these thoughts, he fell peacefully asleep.

Now at this point a curious thing happened. A friend of the dualist who knew about this drug, and who knew of the sufferings of the dualist, decided to put him out of his misery. So in the middle of the night, while the dualist was fast asleep, the friend quietly stole into the house and injected the drug into his veins. The next morning the body of the dualist awoke -without any soul indeed- and the first thing it did was to go to the drugstore to get the drug. He took it home and, before taking it, said, “Now I shall be released.” So he took it and then waited the time interval in which it was supposed to work. At the end of the interval he angrily exclaimed: “Damn it, this stuff hasn’t helped at all! I still obviously have a soul and am suffering as much as ever!”

(This parable was inspired by one written by Raymond M. Smullyan)

[Graphic] Mental Architecture v1.3

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Mental Architecture v1.3

A truly enormous upgrade. New features are as follows:

  • Memory Hierarchy
  • The Cognitive Roots Of Culture
  • Grounding Construal Level Theory
  • Grounding Dual Process Theory
  • Six Pillars Of Selfhood
  • Improved Motor Specificity

It is important to remember that these posts/diagrams are not theories in their own right. Only communicated architectural solutions qualify for this. Instead, these “version” posts give me a skeleton around which I could communicate what lives in my head. They are progress indicators I leave behind as my theories become more powerful.

Memory Hierarchy

This architecture constitutes my first “memory-centric” mental architecture.

  • Episodic memory is “video film” – that is, memories of past events.
  • Semantic memory draws from episodic memory, extracting facts and abstracting information. For example, your semantic notion of FIVE generalizing past events with e.g., five objects.
  • Frame memory also draws from episodic memory, extracting relational and behavioral patterns held in common. For example, your frame notion of RESTAURANT generalizes the behavioral patterns expected of your past restaurant visits.

Episodic memory is the “parent” of frame and semantic memory. It is the most verbose, and also the most lossy. Both other formats are better preserved across an organism’s lifetime.

Open Questions: I’ve noted indexical relationships between episodic memory and the other two formats. How else do these representational formats interrelate?

Epistemic status: takes three ubiquitous memory categories, and posits a relationship between them. While some have suggested that semantic memory draws from episodic memory, and others that frame memory draws from episodic memory (Atran ), I have not yet discovered gestures at an integration of both inheritance models besides my own.

The Cognitive Roots Of Culture

What is culture? Some people would gesture towards knowledge accretion, such as the knowledge requisite in the forging of bronze weaponry.  But others would say that culture is the birthplace of institutions like economies, political parties, and religions.

Cognitive science must explain both. Here, I claim that the former is shared semantic content, and the latter is shared frame content.

Open Questions: How exactly is semantic memory distinct from frame memory?

Epistemic status: This is highly original, and also highly tentative. I’ll feel better about it once I have a clear understanding of how frame files differ from the object files of semantic memory. But it beats having no idea where culture comes from. 🙂

Grounding Construal Level Theory

Construal Level Theory (CLT) is a theory of psychological distance. It posits that the mind retains information in two representations formats: high-level and low-level construals. This dichotomy is, among many other things, used to explain hyperbolic discounting. In my architecture, I identity low-level construals with episodic memory, and high-level construals with semantic & frame memory.

Note: A lot of insight will be unlocked after I unearth the above open questions re: frame memory.

Epistemic Status: Construal Level Theory (CLT) is a rather broad & powerful theory, and enjoys a wealth of experimental evidence. This explanation for CLT is unfortunately ambiguous first draft, but does (I think) gesture at an underappreciated connection with memory science.

Grounding Dual Process Theory

Dual Process Theory (DPT) is a theory of the functional role of consciousness. It posits your brain having two modes of operation

  1. System I processes (“the Elephant”) which are unconscious and parallel/fast
  2. System II processes (“the Rider”) which are conscious and serial/slow.

In this architecture, System II processes are identified with working memory. More specifically, your waking experience is broadcast from, and entirely contained within, THIS memory system, and no other. So e.g., I wrote a long time ago that I suspect my phonological loop is a bit atypical. If the above is correct, this means my conscious experience is likewise a tiny bit separated from the norm.

Open Questions: I haven’t finished ingesting this theory, so open questions will have to wait. 🙂

Epistemic Status: This synthesis is not my own. It is almost entirely attributable to Carruthers’ work (e.g., The Centered Mind). It is an interpretation of Global Workspace Theory, which enjoys considerable support (verging on consensus).

Six Pillars Of Selfhood

The self is not a single thing. I submit that your brain accomplishes self-reference in six distinct ways.

  • The Embodied Self is your brain’s model of the body. It is known in the literature as the cortical homunculus, or “neuromatrix”.
  • The Experiencing Self is conscious perception, that is, when sense data are globally broadcast from working memory. Note connections with Kahneman.
  • The Remembering Self is conscious memories; that is, when autobiographical episodes are globally broadcast from working memory. Note connections with Kahneman.
  • The Introspection Self is the result of applying one’s mindreading capabilities on oneself. For now, I follow Carruthers’ Opacity Of Mind: introspection is not self-knowledge, but rather self-interpretation (vulnerable to confabulation).
  • The Social Self is who we are to other people. Gestured at in Granite In Every Soul, this self is responsible for the creation of self-esteem, as explored by sociometer theory.
  • The Purposive Self is the goals one has in life, and the social roles a person may inhabit. Closely connected with the Identity Construction module & self-enhancement theory.

Importantly, the format of each self is known. This is documented in the “color coding” in the above graphic.

Open Questions: The interrelationships between the “selves”.

Epistemic Status: Unlike the rest of this architecture, the six pillars is not intended as a theory. It is a taxonomy is meant as an explanatory aid, to assist the process of theorybuilding. (It will graduate to a theory after its mechanisms are unearthed.)

Improved Motor Specificity

Reintroduces the motor details already present in Mental Architecture v0.1.

[Graphic] Social Architecture v0.1

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Personality is software. Where feeling-of-meaning (and every other social experience and behavior) come from. A first draft.

This graphic illustrates the social component of human mental architecture, and seeks to integrate insights from (among others) self-verification theory, self-enhancement theory, sociometer theory, attachment theory, and motivation crowding theory.

More than other aspects of my research, this particular integration is heavily under development; and quite volatile. But I need to hit CTRL-S this week, for various reasons.

Social Architecture v0.1

Besides explaining this thing, I need to explore self-verification theory and terror management theory, integrating any insights not already captured.

Eventually, I intend to explain how this circuit is modified by social networks; that is, its construction of political, cultural, economic, and religious contexts.

[Graphic] Mental Architecture v1.2

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Today’s post is a bit experimental. In addition to producing the next revision of my architecture diagram, I will indulge in autobiographical musings.  I suspect this will become useful historical data (but, failing that, may constitute a source of humor :P)

I have recently completed a sequence on Theory Of Mind. This sequence is a synthesis of my own making. It marries the following mini-theories:

  1. Agent Detection arguments (Scott Atran’s arguments, among others)
  2. Intentional Stance (inspired by Daniel Dennett)
  3. Spinozan brain (Gilbert thesis).
  4. False beliefs blindness solved by counterfactuals (a small part of Leslie’s theory).

While I agree that pretense is the solution to false belief blindness, I currently reject Leslie’s broader theory of representation. This is despite my own synthesis e.g., not yet providing a mechanical explanation for the phenomenon of counterfactual decoupling.

With the completion of this sequence, it is time to update my vision of mental architecture.

Architecture v1.2

Recent musings on culture:

  • Introducing human culture as something that organisms inherit. Follows the dual inheritance model of Boyd and Richerson. For now (this is my first truly serious foray into the science of culture)
  • When it comes time to investigate culture, I want to learn how dominance hierarchies fractionated into (1) religions, (2) marked social groups, (3) economies, (4) political affiliations, and (5) cultural knowledge. I want to explore which cultural mode manifested first in human evolution (a “phylogeny of cultural modes”), and why every branch is not covered by others (especially the different services provided between religions/marked social groups/political affiliations).

Recent musings on identity systems:

  • I’ve added three modules representing various processes underlying identity management. Arguably, there are four identity management motives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-evaluation_motives. The three modules explore self-verification theory (c.f., confirmation bias), self-confirmation theory (c.f. self-esteem and its relation to expanding latitudes of belief), and self-evaluation (c.f., Bandura’s self-efficacy and Ainslie’s personal rules). I don’t require an explicit module for self-improvement at this time, as I suspect it may be a comparatively-more composite process.

Recent musings on decision systems:

  • A recent integrative “aha moment”, which I have not yet had time to explain: Motivation Is Utility Transduction. All of the explananda I had been reserving for motivation, I am hoping to reduce in utility production later passed to neuroeconomic winner-take-all mechanisms.
  • I wonder whether attention needs to be exploded into several modules; perhaps a separate module to track e.g., perceptual attention like saccades. I also wonder whether one of these exploded modules will connect with the Central Executive of Working Memory.

Known omissions and “module folding”:

  • Arousal module remains omitted (for the same reason that Heart Rate and other brain stem functions aren’t captured here).
  • Metaphor remains omitted, as I suspect that it is an artifact of Hebbian learning (that is, closer married to neurophysiology than dedicated computational modules)
  • Kin Detection (related to e.g., see filial imprinting) is folded into Agent Classifier.
  • Folk Geometry is folded into Folk Math.

Miscellaneous changes:

  • Adding an Environment -> Genome arrow to represent epigenetics. Mostly a bookmark b/c I need to absorb more from this field.
  • Folk Psychology moved to Social Systems (as discussed in Intentional Stance)

Research Directions:

  • My current investigations have tended to center around social psychology (e.g., tribalism, morality, love, religion, culture). In the next 6 months, it would be good for me to swing back to the cognitive side (e.g., language, domain-specificity of memory).

Counterfactual Simulation: Presumed Similar Until Proven Different

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Part Of: Sociality sequence
Content Summary: 1400 words, 14 min read

False Belief Blindness

Consider the Sally-Anne test:

A child is in a room, watching Sally and Anne who are also in the room. The room has two objects in it: a basket and a box.

Sally has a marble. Sally puts the marble in the basket and leaves the room. While she is gone, Anne moves the marble to the box.

Anne comes back, wanting to play with her marble. Where will she look for it?

To answer the question correctly, it is not enough to model Sally and Anne as having desires and beliefs (to deploy the intentional stance). The child must also be able to differentiate her own knowledge from the knowledge of others (the child is correct, but Sally is wrong). This is an instance of cognitive decoupling: building firewalls around the beliefs/desires of individual agents.

It turns out that 3yo children get the answer wrong, but 5yo children (except autistic ones) get it right. What happens at age four?

Why Belief Inference Is Blind …

At the end of the test, the child believes that the marble is in the box. Sally believes that the marble is in the basket. Their respective minds might look something like this:

ToM- Sally-Anne v1

In Awakening To A Social World, we learned that, at twelve months, children begin to think about other people as having beliefs and goals:

ToM- Sally-Anne v2

If the above picture is how your brain works, it would be puzzling to explain how a child would ever be tempted to conclude that Sally thinks the marble is in the box.

But this is not how your brain encodes second-order beliefs. Here’s what actually happens:

ToM- Sally-Anne v3

Crucially, relational second-order beliefs (“Sally thinks that”) point towards first-order beliefs (“Marble’s in basket”) which live in your world model. This mental library comes equipped with a librarian, who flags the incompatibility between “Marble’s in box” and “Marble’s in basket”, and removes the latter.

Architecturally, the reason why three year olds suffer from false belief blindness is that all beliefs funnel through one world model. There are simply no separate memory spaces to evaluate the world model of other people. In order to understand the beliefs of other people, they must be compatible with facts known by oneself.

… And Recognizing Falsehood Is No Cure

In Gullible By Default we discussed how negating beliefs is optional, effortful, and prone to failure. So you might think that the three year old child hasn’t yet developed the ability to negate Sally’s belief. But you’d be wrong. if you look carefully at the mechanics of negation, you will realize that negation cannot help.

Negating claims is implemented by adding an “It is false that” tag in front of the belief in question. We can negate Sally’s belief in two different ways:

ToM- Negation Cannot Model False Beliefs

Both negations fail. It is simply not true that Sally recognizes the ball isn’t in the basket. Likewise, we cannot say that Sally does not think that the ball is in the basket. Even exotic combinations (e.g., double negatives) are of no use.

But shouldn’t recognizing falsehood in one’s self enable us to recognize it in others?

No. It may help to notice that lie detection immediately corrects false beliefs (by introducing an “it is false than” mental prefix). This repair is essential to protect the mental ecosystem from contamination. Put simply, negation evolved as a protection against deception; it is simply not equipped to recognize honest mistakes.

The Birth Of Creativity

Quite independently of the evolution of lie detectors, the hominid line has also acquired a different kind of ability: the ability for pretense. Did you play the “floor is lava” game as a child? What is going on in the mind of a child when they pretend that couches, etc are the only refuge from a sea of molten rock?

You might be tempted to say that there exists a “floor is lava” belief in your mental library during such games. Or that the falsehood-detector is exploring the possibility of appended “It is false that…” to the traditional belief that “the floor is carpet”. But something more sophisticated is going on. As Leslie puts it:

If I jump up suddenly because I mistakenly think I see a spider on the table, I act as if a spider were there. But I certainly do not pretend a spider is there.

Instead of replacing belief, the child is alternating between competing beliefs. More specifically, the child is building a tiny little scaffold, which hovers over their actual belief that “the floor is carpet” and simulates a world in which that belief is replaced. We may call this counterfactual simulation.

ToM- Sally-Anne v4 Counterfactual Maps

To operate effectively, your counterfactual simulation must:

  • Retain the original belief and its relationships to the rest of your memory. Damaging to any of these forms of knowledge are irreversible.
  • Construct maps between the original belief and the counterfactual. It is not enough to imagine “Floor is Lava”, you must know which belief it overwrites.
  • Distance the prediction machine from the sensorimotor river. The floor’s perceptual signature doesn’t evince visceral fear, for example.

Why has a counterfactual simulator evolved in the hominid line?

Pretense originates in play, but is far more significant than that. With the ability to simulate different worlds, our minds are able to “try on” new beliefs as if they were hats. If we locate a belief that explains the world better than our world model, we upgrade our world model. Counterfactuals allow our prediction machines to upgrade themselves. They are the algorithmic bedrock of creativity.

How Counterfactuals Restored Our Sight …

A timeline of mind-relevant developmental milestones:

  • At 12 months, the intentional stance emerges
  • At 20 months, pretending behavior emerges.
  • At 48 months, false belief blindness is overcome.

Despite the large time gap between pretense and the blindness reversal, I claim that pretense is the cure. What gives?

The answer lies in the fallback mechanism for representing false beliefs. Recall that the 13 month old’s mental librarian rejects “Marble’s In Basket” as incompatible, and as a fallback, re-routes “Sally thinks that” towards the true belief “Marble’s In Box”. When the counterfactual simulator comes online at twenty months, it isn’t yet involved in this failure mode.

It is only slowly that the child’s brain discovers that these two technologies can be productively combined. Passing the Sally-Anne test requires a novel modification to the error processing algorithm:

ToM- Sally-Anne v5 Counterfactual Redemption

Not only are false beliefs encoded counterfactually, but the novel data are stored in the relationship model for later reuse. This is how we become aware of the fallibility of our peers.

… At The Cost Of Self-Anchoring

In Epistemic Topography, I said this:

The curse of knowledge expects short inferential distances. Why does this bias (not another) live in our brains?

As we have seen, estimating [epistemic] location is expensive. So the brain takes a shortcut: it uses a location it already knows about (its own) and employs differences between the Self and the Other to estimate distance. Call this self-anchoring. But the brain isn’t aware of all differences, only those it observes. Hence the process of “pushing out” one’s estimation of Other Locations typically doesn’t go far enough… the birthplace of the curse.

We now have a mechanical explanation for this mental shortcut. The more differences between our beliefs and another person, the more data we must encoded counterfactually. But counterfactuals are not prediction machines in their own right; they only facilitate tinkering with our own machinery. Other people are thus presumed similar until proven different.

Takeaways

Executive Summary:

  • Three year old children cannot conceive of other people being wrong.  This is far after they become mind-aware, even after they become able to recognize deceit. What gives?
  • First, children are blind to false beliefs because all beliefs (mine and yours) are based in the same location: the mental library, or world model.
  • Second, falsehood detection ultimately evolved as a deception-detector; why should we expect it to also function as a wrongness-detector?
  • The ability to pretend (e.g., “This Floor Is Lava”) allows our minds to test out new beliefs, rejecting the failures and integrating the successes.
  • The ability to simulate counterfactuals opens up a new pathway to encode false beliefs.
  • However, this pathway doesn’t let us imagine other people independently: other minds are always self-anchored; that is, imaged as deviations from your own mind.

References

  • [Leslie 1987] Pretense and Representation: The Origins of “Theory of Mind” [link]

[Sequence] Sociality

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Selfhood

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Lie Detection: Gullible By Default

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Part Of: Language sequence
Content Summary: 1300 words, 13 min read

Two Tagging Methods

Imagine a library of a few million volumes, a small number of which are fiction. There are at least two reasonable methods with which one could distinguish fiction from nonfiction at a glance:

  1. Paste a red tag on each volume of fiction and a blue tag on each volume of nonfiction.
  2. Tag the fiction and leave the nonfiction untagged.

Perhaps the most striking feature of these two different systems is how similar they are. Despite the fact that the two libraries use somewhat different tagging systems, both ultimately accomplish the same end. Imagine each book If the labeling was done by a machine inside of a tiny closet – if a library user could not see with her own eyes the method employed, is there any hope of her discovering the truth method employed?

This is exactly the problem faced by cognitive scientists trying to understand the nature of belief. Your brain is responsible for maintaining a collection of beliefs (the mental library). Some of these beliefs are marked true (e.g., “fish swim”); others are marked false (e.g., “Santa Claus is real”). As philosophers in the 18th century discovered, your brain could process truth from falsehood in two distinct ways:

  1. Rene Descartes thought the brain uses the red-blue system. That is, it first tries to comprehend an idea (import the book) and then evaluate its status (give it the appropriate color).
  2. Baruch Spinoza thought the brain uses the tagged-untagged system. That is, it first tries to comprehend an idea (import the book) and then check whether it is fiction (decide whether it needs to be tagged).

Here is a graphical representations of the two brains:

Default Gullibility- Two World Model Updating Systems

Would The Real Brain Please Stand Up?

Ideal mental systems have unlimited processing resources and an unstoppable tagging system. Real mental systems operate under imperfect conditions and a finite pool of resources, which causes these mental processes to sometimes fail. Sometimes, your brain isn’t able to assess beliefs at all.

What happens when a Cartesian red-blue brain is unable to fully assess incoming beliefs? Well, if the world model is left alone after comprehension (middle column), then resultant beliefs are neither marked true nor false, easily distinguishable from more trustworthy beliefs.

What happens when a Spinozan tagged-untagged brain cannot assess an incoming belief? Well, if its World Model processing stops after comprehension (middle column), then the novel claims appear identical to true beliefs.

On the Cartesian system, comprehension is distinct from acceptance. On a Spinozan system, comprehension is acceptance, and an additional (optional!) effort is required to unaccept belief. Cartesian brains are innately analytic, Spinozan brains are innately gullible.

So which is it? Is your brain Cartesian or Spinozan?

Three Reasons Why Your Brain Is Spinozan

Three streams of evidence independently corroborate the existence of the Spinozan brain.

First, scientists have confirmed time and again that distraction amplifies gullibility.

[Festinger & Maccoby 1964] demonstrated that subjects who listened to an untrue communication while attending to an irrelevant stimulus were particularly likely to accept the propositions they comprehended (see [Baron & Miller 1973] for a review of such studies)

When resource-depleted persons are exposed to doubtful propositions (i.e., propositions that they normally would disbelieve), their ability to reject those propositions is markedly reduced (see [Petty & Cacioppo 1986] for a review).

This effect appears in more complex scenarios, too. Suppose your friend Clyde says that “dragons exist”. In this scenario, the brain may not simply wish to reject that (first-order) claim, but also implement lie detection via rejecting the second-order proposition that “Clyde thinks that dragons exist”.

Default Gullibility- Two Types Of Negation (1)

In the context of second-order propositions, distraction causes an even stronger inability to reject claims:

After decades of research activity, both the lie-detection and attribution literatures have independently concluded that people are particularly prone to accept the second-order propositions implicit in others’ words and deeds (for reviews of these literatures see, respectively, [Zuckerman, Depaulo, & Rosenthal 1981] and [Jones 1979]. What makes this phenomenon so intriguing is that people accept these assertions even when they know full well that the assertions stand an excellent chance of being wrong. For example, if an authority asks someone to read aloud a prepared statement (e.g., “I am in favor of federal protection of armadillos”), people [still] assume that the speaker believes the words coming out of the speaker’s mouth. This robust tendency is precisely the sort that a resource-depleted Spinozan system should display.

Not only does dubious position assertions more believable amidst distraction, the opposite of reasonable denials are also likely to be affirmed. That is, resource depletion will cause statements like “Bob Talbert not linked to Mafia” to induce belief in “Bob Talbert linked to Mafia”. The Cartesian model predicts no such asymmetry in response to resource depletion during assessment.

Second, children develop the ability to believe long before the ability to disbelieve.

The ability to deny propositions is, in fact, one of the last linguistic abilities to emerge in childhood [Bloom 1970] [Pea 1980] Although very young children may use the word no to reject, the denial function of the word is not mastered until quite a bit later.

Furthermore, young children are particularly prone to accept propositions uncritically (see [Ceci et al 1987]). Although such hypersuggestibility is surely exacerbated by the child’s inexperience and powerlessness, young children are more suggestible than older children even when such factors are taken into account [Ceci et al 1987].

Third, linguistic evidence shows that negative beliefs take longer to assess, and appear less frequently in practice.

A fundamental assumption of psycholinguistic research is that “complexity of in thought tends to be reflected in complexity of expression”, and vice versa. The markedness of a word is usually considered the clearest index of linguistic complexity… The Spinozan hypothesis states that acceptance is a more complex operation than is acceptance and, interestingly enough, the English words that indicate acceptance of ideas are generally unmarked. That is, our everyday language has us speaking of propositions as acceptable and unacceptable instead of rejectable and unrejectable. Indeed, people even speak of belief and disbelief more naturally than they speak of doubt and undoubt.

People are generally quicker to assess true statements, than false statements [Gough 1965].

How Should We Then Think?

Frankly, this was a difficult article to post. Knowing about biases can hurt people; that is, learning about their own flaws can make people defensive and inflexible.

But this sobering post need not cause us to abandon curiosity and pursuit of truth. It is the mark of an educated mind embrace a thought without flinching, to explore its consequences without fear. It is possible to change your mind.

Takeaways

This article was inspired by [Gilbert 1991] How Mental Systems Believe. Points to remember:

  • How to tell truth from falsehood? You can either tag all beliefs true or false (Cartesian system) or only tag false belief (Spinozan system)
  • Beliefs aren’t always fully analyzed. But in a Spinozan system, unassessed beliefs appear true – the system is credulous by default.
  • Comprehension is belief: gullibility is innate. Only critical thinking is optional, effortful, and prone to failure. Your brain is Spinozan.
    • How do we know? Because distraction causes thinkers to become more gullible
    • How do we know? Because young children are very suggestible, only later acquiring the ability to be skeptical
    • How do we know? Because negative beliefs take longer to assess, have more complex words, and appear less frequently in practice.
  • The great master fallacy of the human mind is believing too much.

References

  • [Baron & Miller 1973] The relation between distraction and persuasion.
  • [Bloom 1970] Language development: Form and function in emerging grammars.
  • [Ceci et al 1987] Suggestibility of children’s memory: Psychological implications.
  • [Festinger & Maccoby 1964] On resistance to persuasive communications.
  • [Gough 1965] The verification of sentences: The effects of delay of evidence and sentence length.
  • [Jones 1979] The rocky road from acts to dispositions.
  • [Pea 1980] The development of negation in early child language.
  • [Petty & Cacioppo 1986] The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion.
  • [Zuckerman, Depaulo, & Rosenthal 1981] Verbal and nonverbal communication of deception.