Human Mind 101
how we think and how we don’t
Let’s start with this simple question: What is the purpose of the mind? Being clear about what the mind does would help us understand how it does it.
We propose that the answer to that simple question is also simple: The purpose of the mind is to decide on what we are to do next, on our next move. Of course, being as complex as the human mind is, it is concerned with many other things, like long-term planning, etc. However, we can argue that all those other things are being considered only to give the mind a better idea of, again, what we should do in the next second… Grab that chocolate bar? Stare in the window, contemplating the meaning of it all? Or put on shoes and head out ’cause we’re already late?
Now, to make choices like these, the human mind employs two relatively independent and very different faculties — let’s call them System 1 and System 2.
At least that’s how the two systems are named in Thinking, Fast and Slow by a Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Historically, however, they go by many different names. Mark Manson, in his Everything is F*cked: The Book About Hope refers to the two as the Feeling Brain and the Thinking Brain respectively. In Sigmund Freud’s three-piece model (id, ego, and superego), it’s id and superego as System 1 vs ego as System 2. Freud’s model appears to be a one-to-one match to Socrates' Chariot Allegory, with id as the dark horse, superego as the white one, and ego as the charioteer… such as it is. The Chariot Allegory, for its part, reappears almost verbatim in the Upanishads:
“Self rides in the chariot of the body, intellect the firm-footed charioteer, discursive mind the reins. Feelings are the horses, objects of desire the roads … When a man lacks steadiness, unable to control his mind, his feelings are unmanageable horses. But if he controls his mind, a steady man, they are manageable horses.” (Katha-Upanishad)
Last but not least, Buddha’s elephant rider metaphor deserves a special mention… Maybe we’ll come back to it later. For now, it suffices to say that the two-minds model is anything but new, as it kept being rediscovered since ancient times.
The two systems above approach the basic problem — what to do next — in two distinct ways. System 1 is, essentially, a neural network AI (or, rather, a neural network supercomputer). It does most of its work in the background of our subconsciousness, and is responsible for our intuitive/automatic/habitual behaviour.
Indeed, our intuition drives the great majority of everyday choices. We don’t think through most of them — we make them because it feels like the best course of action. That feeling is intuition, and it is fundamentally unexplainable because it wasn’t based on logic and reason in the first place! Now, that last point may feel counterintuitive, no pun intended. After all, we’d like to think of ourselves as rational individuals. That’s why we are so keen on rationalizing our choices, if after the fact — even though when we do try to think them through, we may conclude that grabbing that chocolate bar was not the best idea after all.
The truth, however, is that we don’t think through most of our choices beforehand. Why do we feel like making them, then? Where those feelings — those intuitions — are coming from? Well, to put it simply, they as based on… statistics. “Wait, what?” — you may well be thinking. “I don’t remember doing much statistics recently!” And that’s true, but only because your subconscious processing, your System 1, keeps doing this work for you. It is forever busy running statistical analysis on your life experiences, and only the bottom line of that processing bubbles up to your conscious awareness in the form of intuitions or feelings.
So that’s System 1 — what about System 2? Rather than relying on statistics, which is another word for guesswork, System 2 tries to understand — ourselves, the things around us, our place in the world — by visualizing a simulation of our Reality, of everything in it. Visualizing a model of ourselves, as part of that simulation, makes us self-aware — or conscious, of ourselves and our actions.
The two systems are meant to work together as a team. System 1 is in the driver's seat, it’s the one fast enough to react in real time. The job of System 2 is to navigate — to piece together a map of our Reality, and to use that map to see where we are, where we want to be, and how to get there… Of course, System 2's navigation is only as good as its map.
This might be a good topic for our next post — how do we assemble the “map” of our Reality, and why it is not always easy.
