Chapter 6: Norms, Surprises, and Causes
“The main function of S1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future.”
“A capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life, and surprise itself is the most sensitive indication of how we understand our world and what we expect from it.”
Expectations can be active and conscious (waiting for a particular event), and passive (you don’t wait for them, but you are not surprise when they happen.)
“Norm Theory”: events appear normal because they recruit the original episode, retrieve it from memory, and are interpreted in conjunction with it.
Violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety.
Seeing Causes and Intentions
- “Finding causal connections is part of understanding a story and is an automatic operation of S1. S2, the conscious self, offers a causal interpretation and accepts it.”
- We have a need for coherence, which can be done S1 with limited information.
- Albert Michotte: we are ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.
- Intentional Causality: your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities.
*Paul Bloom on free will, religion, and evolution
“The experience of freely willed action is quite separate from physical causality. Although it is your hand that picks up the salt, you do not think of the event in terms of a chain of physical causation. You experience it as caused by a decision that a disembodied you made, because you wanted to add salt to your food. Many people find it natural to describe their soul as the source and the cause of their actions. The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in “The Atlantic” in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate form the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.” The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. In Bloom’s view, the two concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religion into the structure of System 1.”
Notes on Ch 5 and Ch 6 dialogue (Outer circle) – with Dylan Evans
· How memories affect our today’s behavior. (Priming, deliberate attempt to make you feel in a certain way.)
o For example, if you want to feel powerful, a button that might trigger that behavior is remembering or imagining a memory or future.
o The activation of a memory triggers a network of concepts.
o Our mind is a network of associations.
· Maybe even sadness evolves in a way of making us think more. Sadder but wiser.
o Depressing realism: people are more accurate in their perceptions when they are depressed.
o Maybe some irrational optimism is needed to be healthy.