I've always been fascinated with meaning, and how meaning is created, refined, discovered and reinvented by the human mind.
Meaning is not a human creation - animals appraise the way various stimuli will impact on their world, if they will be positive or negative for their life, and have instinctive and learnt reactions at those stimuli.
Yet meaning reaches a complete new dimension in a rich cognitive life of a human being. Meaning comes both out of truth and knowledge seeking, and out of our aesthetic pleasure and style of interpretation. Sometimes shaping the facts in our life in a more beautiful meaning can give us immense satisfaction, it can motivate us to take action or change course, it can give us that deeper level of understanding that we long for.
In many ways, meaning guides our lives and our behaviour. Interpreting the events that happen to us in a certain way determines the decisions that we will make. We tend to interpret the art/music that we come in contact with based on the meaning and importance that we assign to various experiences in our lives. That is why the meaning of great art is sometimes so ambiguous, having a different nuance for each receiver (and active interpreter). Great art carries enough reference points into meaning to involve us into a new way of perceiving and interpreting, yet little enough detail, or enough vagueness to flexibly accommodate the interpretation bestowed upon it by various minds, with various experiences, impulses, obsessions, joys, sorrows.
Some of us search in art for a transcendence to a deeper form of meaning, one that will take our perception of our own experiences to a new level. We search for a new perspective, a new point of reference, a new way of perceiving the world, or just one singular event. We search for it with the same craving as we search for new knowledge, or new truth.
In a sense, new knowledge has very much the same function in our psyche - it is a rediscovery of the world, a re-understanding, re-inventing. It shifts our perspective. It changes it or transcends it. Sometimes it muddies the waters, and a new point of view that we gather through an (artistic) experience can have trouble coexisting with our other attitudes or cognitive takes on life. Sometimes it clarifies everything, integrates different types of understanding, and gives us the pure exhilaration of transcendence.
From a cognitive stance, meaning is an extraordinary product. It comes from perception, interpretation, previously-held knowledge, emotional approach, processing style and current mood, all added together. It is a synthesis, the bit of magic which sometimes we have and other times we lose, which we strive for. Anchored into meaning, and its complex, sometimes contradictory layers, actions can be understood.
Yet I can't help but wonder, what is the difference between the human search for truth and the human search for meaning? Pure truth - just fact - has to be shaped to be integrated within our meaning, which tries to be a metatruth (an integration of previous true experiences, parts of truth which we have gathered) that comes in the colouring of what that particular truth means to us.
Yet people can reject the truth and prefer something that has more meaning. Accepting the truth can come at the huge emotional and cognitive cost of having to abandon previously held meaning, lose our understanding, and carve our way into organising all the information that we have in a new form. We do not always afford to do that.
But in a way, finding truth and finding meaning is supported by the same drive. Our drive to understand - the world around us, ourselves and others. Meaning has the added bonus of a very high level phenomenological flavor - we like tasting certain types of meaning, we have an aesthetic preference for them.
If it would come to a choice and we could only have one, when would our quest for meaning and when would our quest for truth thrive?
©2012 Ana-Maria Olteteanu
Wednesday 22 August 2012
Tuesday 21 August 2012
Thought as something else
Thought is the process of navigating through previous memory traces,
while navigating through present impressions,
while trying to solve the problems that we imagine will take us closer to our goals, or problems that we are merely interested in and focus on in order to clarify our mental system,
and putting at least some parts of them together in a coherent way, that enables us to do all the above.
It is physical in a sense that it is a process. It is based on physical memory traces and perceptions, under the influence of our motivation, and the combination that ensues thereof.
It is not a magical substance, yet it can't be easily captured by supervising the physical traces that it is navigating. Mainly because it is not programmed, it can lead its own way through all these traces, it can get distracted, it can rebuild memories.
There is no cartesian divide to be found, yet it is befuddling how some people can't see past it. Of course thought is "something else" than physical in certain ways - it is a process, not just its physical traces. It is emergent and happens in a now in the sense that all these traces are observed and felt and activated in the light of current preoccupations, goals, states. And representation is not an object, it's just the perceptual and representational traces it leaves within us.
I can see why people would think thought has somewhat of a vague, eerie, ethereal nature (which makes them see it as a different substance), but those are all qualities that ensue from the principle of a trace, and activating various parts of it in various moments, from the emergent in the present nature that thought has through compositionality with current state, and the changes it goes through. It is only magical to the extent that it is complex, self-guided, unique, elaborative and in creative people quite hard to predict, although a small part of that can be done if you really understand the shapes of thought they prefer, their processes, cognitive, processing and aesthetic style.
It is hard to define thought as a substance in the pure physical sense, and we have this feeling of it being mysterious and ethereal because it is not a substance, it is a process. A process of navigating and activating part of imperfect traces, while reconstructing them, and putting the present activated content together in coherent, self-directed wholes, which can spawn new traces, forever more.
Thought escapes cartesian dualism, and we need new concepts for it. Concepts that are more fluid and integrative than the dichotomies we currently have. Until we know enough to actually understand it well, thought needs us to refine our vision, to follow its versatility with concepts that are more similar in technique to painting the essence of the big picture with broad strokes, more akin to poetry than dualism.
while navigating through present impressions,
while trying to solve the problems that we imagine will take us closer to our goals, or problems that we are merely interested in and focus on in order to clarify our mental system,
and putting at least some parts of them together in a coherent way, that enables us to do all the above.
It is physical in a sense that it is a process. It is based on physical memory traces and perceptions, under the influence of our motivation, and the combination that ensues thereof.
It is not a magical substance, yet it can't be easily captured by supervising the physical traces that it is navigating. Mainly because it is not programmed, it can lead its own way through all these traces, it can get distracted, it can rebuild memories.
There is no cartesian divide to be found, yet it is befuddling how some people can't see past it. Of course thought is "something else" than physical in certain ways - it is a process, not just its physical traces. It is emergent and happens in a now in the sense that all these traces are observed and felt and activated in the light of current preoccupations, goals, states. And representation is not an object, it's just the perceptual and representational traces it leaves within us.
I can see why people would think thought has somewhat of a vague, eerie, ethereal nature (which makes them see it as a different substance), but those are all qualities that ensue from the principle of a trace, and activating various parts of it in various moments, from the emergent in the present nature that thought has through compositionality with current state, and the changes it goes through. It is only magical to the extent that it is complex, self-guided, unique, elaborative and in creative people quite hard to predict, although a small part of that can be done if you really understand the shapes of thought they prefer, their processes, cognitive, processing and aesthetic style.
It is hard to define thought as a substance in the pure physical sense, and we have this feeling of it being mysterious and ethereal because it is not a substance, it is a process. A process of navigating and activating part of imperfect traces, while reconstructing them, and putting the present activated content together in coherent, self-directed wholes, which can spawn new traces, forever more.
Thought escapes cartesian dualism, and we need new concepts for it. Concepts that are more fluid and integrative than the dichotomies we currently have. Until we know enough to actually understand it well, thought needs us to refine our vision, to follow its versatility with concepts that are more similar in technique to painting the essence of the big picture with broad strokes, more akin to poetry than dualism.
Monday 20 August 2012
Rewards as demotivators
What if all that we knew about what makes us do things would be partially wrong? What if giving people rewards for what they are doing would actually make them do that thing less, instead of doing it more?
In psychology this is called the overjustification effect.
Here is how it works: - extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation are not the same thing. Doing something to get something is not the same thing as doing something because you like doing it. Therefore being too goal-focused (and having the goal as something disconnected from the reality of the activity) might make us enjoy the reality of the activity less, shift our focus from the enjoyment, or make us feel anxious while doing it because we are trying to perform better in order to obtain the reward.
Yet why is it that it seems so normal to us that rewards should make people perform better?
How does one start to understand the genealogy of a cognitive mistake?
This theory might seem intuitive through an association to other theories that work, and a wrong inference that, by analogy, the shape of this problem of motivation should be similar.
The two theories that it might thus be associated to which spring to mind are:
- the theory of the survival drive to satisfy one's own needs - the wrong inference goes like this - > if one has an inherent drive to satisfy one's needs, then promising to satisfy them as a reward if that agent does a certain activity should project the drive to satisfy those needs on the activity the agent has to do in exchange.
mistake 1 - who says the drive is really projected on the activity at hand? (see second associated theory)
mistake 2 - given more rewards that could potentially satisfy more needs doesn't mean that a satisfaction point isn't reached, when the agent loses drive for having those needs satisfied
mistake 3 - drive for obtaining something is not the same thing as the drive needed to sustain an activity in a performant, productive fashion
- pavlovian conditioning - if an object of desire is associated with another object for long enough, the symptoms of desire could appear in the presence of the other object
mistake 1 - it might work with objects and contexts up to a point, but who is to say that one can transfer desire for an object to desire for performing an activity (by offering that object as a reward for performing the activity)
mistake 2 - as human psychology is quite complex, it is very hard to say if in the same circumstance, the human won't simply feel inadequate for being unable to get the object himself, offended by having to trade an activity for it, and angry that the other person possessing the reward is making it so hard for him to reach the object of desire - all this resentment is bound to make the human feeling not quite so positive about the activity to do.
It seems we have cognitive blindspots, which we refuse to analyse. We all have the experience of not feeling motivated to do something despite the reward we have been promised, or starting from something that we normally love doing, then spoiling it to regimenting it too much and focusing on rules of doing it, the time it takes us to do it or how to move achieve it much faster, although, thus affecting negatively instead of focusing on the pleasure we get while doing it.
Yet this is cognitively unintuitive - it is trendy to think that if only we could give ourselves more rewards we would probably be more productive, or if only we would raise the stake more, put ourselves in competition, put a more anxious deadline or deal with even more discipline with our own work.
So despite having the experiences that would permit us to learn what motivates us, we stick to the norm of what should be motivating, and fail to formulate our own theories of what is really motivating based on our own experience.
That is why when people like Daniel Pink write a book like Drive, which discusses experimental evidence on what really motivates people, they reach a chord which resonates within all of us. They overthrow trends of thought, and verbalise the cognitive reality shadowed by our blindspots. They give our brain the ability to cognitively process and understand something which was previously hidden, yet completely belongs to us, to the way we function, to our experience.
In psychology this is called the overjustification effect.
Here is how it works: - extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation are not the same thing. Doing something to get something is not the same thing as doing something because you like doing it. Therefore being too goal-focused (and having the goal as something disconnected from the reality of the activity) might make us enjoy the reality of the activity less, shift our focus from the enjoyment, or make us feel anxious while doing it because we are trying to perform better in order to obtain the reward.
Yet why is it that it seems so normal to us that rewards should make people perform better?
How does one start to understand the genealogy of a cognitive mistake?
This theory might seem intuitive through an association to other theories that work, and a wrong inference that, by analogy, the shape of this problem of motivation should be similar.
The two theories that it might thus be associated to which spring to mind are:
- the theory of the survival drive to satisfy one's own needs - the wrong inference goes like this - > if one has an inherent drive to satisfy one's needs, then promising to satisfy them as a reward if that agent does a certain activity should project the drive to satisfy those needs on the activity the agent has to do in exchange.
mistake 1 - who says the drive is really projected on the activity at hand? (see second associated theory)
mistake 2 - given more rewards that could potentially satisfy more needs doesn't mean that a satisfaction point isn't reached, when the agent loses drive for having those needs satisfied
mistake 3 - drive for obtaining something is not the same thing as the drive needed to sustain an activity in a performant, productive fashion
- pavlovian conditioning - if an object of desire is associated with another object for long enough, the symptoms of desire could appear in the presence of the other object
mistake 1 - it might work with objects and contexts up to a point, but who is to say that one can transfer desire for an object to desire for performing an activity (by offering that object as a reward for performing the activity)
mistake 2 - as human psychology is quite complex, it is very hard to say if in the same circumstance, the human won't simply feel inadequate for being unable to get the object himself, offended by having to trade an activity for it, and angry that the other person possessing the reward is making it so hard for him to reach the object of desire - all this resentment is bound to make the human feeling not quite so positive about the activity to do.
It seems we have cognitive blindspots, which we refuse to analyse. We all have the experience of not feeling motivated to do something despite the reward we have been promised, or starting from something that we normally love doing, then spoiling it to regimenting it too much and focusing on rules of doing it, the time it takes us to do it or how to move achieve it much faster, although, thus affecting negatively instead of focusing on the pleasure we get while doing it.
Yet this is cognitively unintuitive - it is trendy to think that if only we could give ourselves more rewards we would probably be more productive, or if only we would raise the stake more, put ourselves in competition, put a more anxious deadline or deal with even more discipline with our own work.
So despite having the experiences that would permit us to learn what motivates us, we stick to the norm of what should be motivating, and fail to formulate our own theories of what is really motivating based on our own experience.
That is why when people like Daniel Pink write a book like Drive, which discusses experimental evidence on what really motivates people, they reach a chord which resonates within all of us. They overthrow trends of thought, and verbalise the cognitive reality shadowed by our blindspots. They give our brain the ability to cognitively process and understand something which was previously hidden, yet completely belongs to us, to the way we function, to our experience.
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