Rational Emotion

This is my response to Jenn's post Dismissing Emotion.

There are two kinds of mental process, conscious and subconscious. We can report the logic of the conscious mind, but we can't observe or give an accounting of the logic of the subconscious. However, many people learn the skill of explaining their subconscious processing after the fact, "rationalizing" the conclusions they came to subconsciously. Doing this completes a feedback loop in which the rules the subconscious uses in its processing can be updated. Basically, the conscious mind can be used to discard the false premises the subconscious may have been relying on.The movie Memento illustrates the inverse of how this is supposed to work. Instead of reliably updating old information with new, our hero deliberately deceives himself.

What is emotion? It is the motive impulse, the thing that drives us to act. It is the expression of mental processing, the result of our thinking, where thinking includes conscious and subconscious mental processes.

The conventional wisdom is that it is a mistake to act on impulse/emotion. However, this is something of a misdiagnosis. It isn't that emotion is unreliable, it's that in new situations our thinking is not well-developed and can be mistaken in its conclusions. The conventional wisdom is correct that it's best to pause and take stock and to seek to understand the situation in new light so as to avoid mistakes. But emotion versus reason is a false dichotomy. Emotion flows from reason.

Components of "Smart"

I think that "smart" is one of those terms that people believe they understand, but is in fact so poorly defined that it risks uselessness as a descriptor. IQ is better defined because it refers to a score received on a test (or actually one of several tests, so some serious ambiguity remains). However, there are questions about what is actually being measured by IQ testing, so practical usefulness is limited here as well.

Measurement may be a problem, but definition need not be. There's no need to continue conflating multiple different characteristics and abilities under the term "smart", or even "intelligent".

Knowledge - This is accessible stored information. It grows with experience and study, but different people have differing abilities to absorb and retain information. There is the additional complication that possessing existing knowledge makes it easier to add and retain new knowledge, because retention is tied to the ability to index new information to information that has already been assimilated.

Processing Routines - These are sets of sequential operations that have been "burned in" to the brain by repetitive use. They can be simple or complex. Examples range from calculating multiplication tables to riding a bike. As with knowledge, different people have different abilities to create, maintain, and use these routines.

Concept Synthesis - This is the creation of a substantively novel concept through the blending of two or more existing concepts. This is probably what is most often referred to as "creative thinking". It is genuinely creative. It is the ability to recognize that many elements together don't just form a group, they form a pattern.

Relational Analysis - This is closely related to the ideas of Knowledge and Concept Synthesis. It is the ability to find or create links between distinct concepts. It reinforces Knowledge retention by increasing indexing between pieces of information. It supports Concept Synthesis by suggesting which concepts may have useful synergies.

I'm sure there's more than this. What are some other ways of looking at what it is to be smart?

Conscious and Subconscious

The mind has two kinds of process: processes that we are directly aware of and can observe (conscious), and processes that we are not directly aware of and cannot observe (subconscious). The vast majority of the work that the mind does is invisible to us, or subconscious, but it can be observed indirectly.

The subconscious mind is very fast. Think of how quickly you blink if something suddenly moves near your face.

The conscious mind is slow.

The subconscious mind does parallel processing, and works with many variables simultaneously. After all, it has to coordinate complex motion in tens of muscles just so you can stand up.

The conscious mind does serial processing, and handles no more than a handful of variables at once.

Subconscious processes are automatic.

Conscious processes are deliberate.

The subconscious mind ‘speaks’ to the conscious mind through emotions. The best example I can think of for this is how I feel when I sense that I am being lied to. Usually I don’t even know right at first how I know that I’m being lied to. At first I just feel it. That’s my subconscious telling my conscious to look out.

The conscious mind ‘speaks’ to the subconscious through decision making – literally rewriting the programming that the subconscious is executing.

The subconscious mind runs according to a preexisting program (it’s not writing the logic as it goes, the logic is already there). However, this can get complicated, because one of the things the subconscious can be programmed to do is to look for insights and solutions to problems.

The conscious mind is writing its own program as it goes along.

The subconscious comes preloaded with software – but that software can be rewritten.

The conscious mind comes nearly without software, but it has the ability to start writing its own software immediately.

From these observations I suggest a model of the mind that describes the subconscious mind as procedural and operational, while the conscious mind is programming space. When I say that the subconscious is procedural, I mean that it follows a deterministic instruction set. When I say that it is operational, I mean that it is the part of the mind that is actually executing nearly all actions. I believe this is consistent with the work of Benjamin Libet.