You Don't Think

In an era of of click-bait and likes, ratings and relatability, it turns out that the thing I really want to say has – so far as I can tell – an audience of absolutely zero.

 I say this because over the last decade or so the ideas of shifting from courses to resources, and from classroom to experience design have gained traction – but the central idea on which these developments are based – the affective context model - remains obscure.

There is a great irony about language: at heart it only works when we are saying the same thing.  Saying something new requires new words, new pictures, new actions.

 The affective context model claims, in essence, that we don’t ‘remember’ anything. Instead we have subtle affective (emotional) reactions to events around us and we use these delicate affective patterns to reconstruct situations as needed. It is a powerful theory because – so far as I am aware – it is the only theory that comes close to explaining the way people actually remember or learn; in particular the systematic inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies of these systems (I usually quote Loftus’ research into eye-witness testimony as an example).

 But there is a more profound idea underpinning this approach – a more shocking and radical suggestion: not only do we not remember, we don’t think.

 Since the time of Plato we have assumed a qualitative distinction between thinking and feeling – that these are somehow different kinds of things. But this, I want to argue, is incorrect. What we call ‘thoughts’ are merely subtle forms of feelings. The same cognitive apparatus underpins both; the brain does not have ‘thinking areas’ and ‘feeling areas’ but instead ‘primitive feeling’ and ‘sophisticated feeling’ areas.

 Strange as this idea may sound, there is a growing body of scientific support. In his book ‘Descartes’ error’ the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues we are wrong to separate thinking and feeling – they are part of a single, integrated, system. But despite the efforts of Kahneman, Ariely and others to catalogue the oddities of human cognition, we have persisted in seeing these as biases in a fundamentally rational system – rather than features of a fundamentally affective system. Even as the detail is coming into focus, we refuse to see the big picture:

 So: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is just an elaborate version of ‘ow’ - a vocalization of sophisticated sentiments, but not something qualitatively different.

 This model resolves a long-standing question; why it is that humans think and animals do not. The answer – rather uncomfortably – is that humans don’t think, we just have more complicated feelings.

 Unfortunately, thanks to Plato, we have long presumed a qualitative distinction between thinking and feeling: the rational ‘charioteer’ steering the chariot of the passions. Descartes merely deepened the divide, casting us as thinking creatures (‘I think, therefore I am’) when in reality we were only ever feeling creatures. David Hume argued that ‘reason is and should only ever be the slave of the passions’ but did not go far enough – as it turns out reason is only an elaboration of the passions. Only Nietzsche came close: “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings, always simpler, darker, emptier.”

 As an aside this is why we are right to be concerned about AI: we have birthed a species that is more alien to us than anything we could dream up in science fiction – precisely because they are thinking creatures! Computers are thinking machines, whilst we are – despite our affectations – merely feeling machines. We have more in common with the cats and dogs we keep as pets than we do with the laptops we keep on our desks. Where AI does things that we also do – such as driving or playing chess – it does so in a profoundly different way. Humans feel our way through such problems, where computers compute. There really is no chance whatsoever that AI will ever be human-like, because human cognition is entirely based on our emotional responses – and we have yet to design a machine around affective reactions.

It seems to me that when people open their mouths to speak - to argue or discuss, explain or convince - that they are merely expressing sentiments more deeply felt. So in conclusion, somewhat ironically, if you don't feel the same way as me I am sure you will disagree.