When I procrastinate over a task, it's usually because I'm in a situation like this:
1) I want something to have been done and 2) I don't want to experience doing it.
To use the classic example, I want to have done my homework but I don't want to be doing my homework.
Consider the case of a hungry rat that sees food on the other side of an electrified floor. The rat wants to minimize its discomfort. It wants to not get shocked, and also wants not to be hungry.
A moderately stupid rat will compare the pain of its current hunger to the pain of crossing the floor. When its pain from hunger becomes as strong as the pain of crossing the floor, it'll decide to cross the floor.
A smarter rat will realize that it'll have to cross the floor eventually, and so will minimize its total pain by crossing immediately, so its hunger doesn't have a chance to build to a painful level.
A really stupid rat will notice that, when it steps onto the electrified floor, its current pain equals the sum of its pain from hunger and the pain from the shock. As this total is always greater than the pain from hunger alone, it'll never step on the electrified floor and it will starve to death.
When it comes to homework, my decision-making algorithm seems to act like the first rat...
This is one place where Caplan seems to go off the deep end. I think it illustrates what happens if you take the Cynic's view to the logical conclusion. In his "gun to the head" analogy, Caplan suggests that OCD isn't really a disease! After all, if we put a gun to the head of someone doing (say) repetitive hand washing, we could convince them to stop. Instead, Caplan thinks it's better to just say that the person just really likes doing those repetitive behaviors.
As one commenter points out, this is equivalent to saying a person with a broken foot isn't really injured because they could walk up a flight of stairs if we put a gun to their head. They just prefer to not walk up the stairs.
It is an incredibly simplistic technique to reduce the brain to a single, unified organ, and determine the "true" desires by revealed preferences. Minds are much more complex and conflicted than that. Whatever people mean by "myself", it is surely not just the combined output of their brain.
I used to have a mild case of OCD.
Let's say I cracked my first knuckle. Well, of course I'm going to crack the other three to balance things out. But then I mess up - my ring finger is only 70% cracked. I can feel it in the joint, a sort of localized anxiety (sort of like an itch, or a joint that needs stretching, but it's a purely psychological irritation). Obviously I can't 30% crack my knuckle - that's no different than moving the finger. So I have to over crack it, up to 130%, and then follow up with the other three fingers.
But now I"ve hit a problem - I've cracked each finger twice, that's not a good number. Things feel worse than they did before the crack. I'd better square things out, so that each finger has been cracked four times - that's a good number. But now my right hand is bothering me, so to even it out I crack each finger there four times. And... oh, what the hell. We'll crack each finger sixteen times. That's 2^8 * 2^4 - gorgeous. I mean, just look at that notation! How much prettier could you want it to be?
Everything's fine until next time I need to crack something... shudder
I eventually forced myself to stop doing this during my last years of Hi...
I sometimes control my OCD by crossing my fingers in a certain very odd pattern whenever I do something (like locking a door). Then, as soon as I come to a notebook or a computer with my fingers still crossed, I write down "I locked the door at 5:27 PM, August 10, 2009". When I've done this, I can just look at the paper and my compulsion to check whether or not the door is really locked mostly goes away.
I used to try the same thing without the finger crossing, and I found that I was always able to believe there was just the tiniest chance that I might have formed the false memory of having locked the door between locking it and reaching the notepad. Because I don't cross my fingers except while in the act of locking the door and I don't write a note unless my fingers are crossed, I can dispel that last nagging doubt. From a rational point of view it's not very sensible, but it seems to work okay.
In both cases, the conscious mind determines the signal and the unconscious mind determines the action.
Look more closely. All preferences are equal, in the sense of being within the same system -- and this includes signaling preferences. The drunk prefers to drink and prefers to not be thought of as preferring that. But these are not concepts of a different nature; they can both be expressed within the same behavioral preference system.
IOW, both the Cynical and Naive theories are wrong; we only have one set of preferences, it just sometimes works out that the "best" compromise (in the sense of being an approach that your brain can discover through trial and error) is to say one thing and do another. But both the saying and doing are behaviors of the same type; "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is a red herring here.
Now, if you want to say that you don't consciously identify with some subset of your choices or preferences, that's fine, but it's not useful to claim that this is the result of some schism in your being. It's all you, you just aren't being conscious of that part of "you" at the moment.
The "unconscious mind" isn't a...
I'm using the word "conscious" to refer to things I want to want and things I would do more with infinite willpower. I'm using the word "unconscious" to refer to things I don't want to want and things I would do less with infinite willpower. I don't think it's too controversial that those are two different categories.
But they're not natural categories. The problem is that "consciousness" tends to focus on behaviors rather than the goals of those behaviors... as will be obvious to you if you've ever been a programmer trying to get people to give you actual requirements instead of just feature specifications. ;-)
So, it can be quite factually the case that you want not to do certain things, while also wanting (implicitly) some part of the result of those actions.
The problem is that protesting you don't want the action is not helpful. Our preferences are most visible in the breach, because consciousness is effectively an error handler. So your attention is drawn to the errors caused by the behavior, rather than to the goal of the behavior. Your brain wants you to just fix the error, and leave the working part of the system (from its point of vie...
You misremember my position. I have not argued that the unconscious is right and the conscious wrong. I have argued (e.g., here) for trying to find a compromise to make peace between the conflicting parts of yourself. At the last OB/LW meetup I argued this point in person to several people, all of whom instead favored vigilant internal war.
This comment reads like an allegorical prescription for how one ought to resolve conflicts within oneself ;).
It is a classic finding in evolutionary psychology: the person who wants to fool others begins by fooling themselves.
I object to two points here: (1) calling it a finding and (2) calling it evolutionary psychology. It certainly is popular in evolutionary psychology, but I don't see any argument (certainly not in that link) that it is selected over generations rather than learned over a lifetime. More importantly, it's a hypothesis, not a "finding." There's very little evidence, largely because it's difficult to test. I also doubt it's specific enough to test.
Differences between the conscious and unconscious mind should usually correspond to differences between the goals of a person and the "goals" of the genome, or else between subgoals important today and subgoals important in the EEA.
That's evolutionary psychology and it's rather at odds at the previous claim! (The first part might be a way of making the original claim more specific, but it's rather different from what people usually say.)
Conscious minds are potentially rational, informed by morality, and qualia-laden. Unconscious minds aren't.
Your entire argument for preferring conscious over unconscious minds is this last quick throw away sentence? That's it? Come on, why can't unconscious minds be rational, informed by morality, or qualia-laden? And why are those the features that matter? Are you really implying this is so completely obvious that this one quick sentence is all that needs to be said? Declaring conscious goals to be the goals of the "person", versus unconscious goals as goals of the genome, just presupposes your answer.
I guess I did consider it that completely obvious. If it's causing so much controversy, maybe I need to think about it more.
I'm defining my "conscious self" as the part of my mind that creates my verbal stream of thought and which controls what I believe I would do if I had infinite willpower. I'm defining "unconscious self" as the source of my inability to always go through with my conscious mind's desires.
By definition, my unconscious mind has no qualia / experiences / awareness, because if it did it would be part of my conscious mind (I suppose it's possible that it is a "different person" who has experiences that are not my experiences, but I have never heard anyone propose this before and don't know of any evidence for it.)
When I use the word "I", I refer to the locus of my qualia and experiences, and thus to my conscious mind. I have no selfish reason to care about my unconscious mind, because its state as happy or unhappy has no relationship to my state as happy or unhappy except insofar as the unconscious mind can influence the conscious mind. And I have no moral reason to care about my unconscious mind, because in my moral system onl...
The example with the unrepentant drunk reminds me of this joke:
A hunter goes into the woods to hunt a bear. He carries his trusty 22-gauge rifle with him. After a while, he spots a very large bear, takes aim, and fires. When the smoke clears, the bear is gone.
A moment later the bear taps the hunter on the shoulder and says, "No one shoots at me and gets away with it. You have two choices: I can rip your throat out and eat you, or you can drop your trousers, bend over, and I'll do you in the ass."
The hunter decides that anything is better than death, so he drops his trousers and bends over, and the bear does what he said he would do. After the bear has left, the hunter pulls up his trousers again and staggers back into town. He's pretty mad.
He buys a much larger gun and returns to the forest. He sees the same bear, aims, and fires. When the smoke clears, the bear is gone. A moment later the bear taps the hunter on the shoulder and says,
"You know what to do."
Afterwards, the hunter pulls up his trousers, crawls back into town, and buys a bazooka. Now he's really mad. He returns to the forest, sees the bear, aims, and fires. The force of the bazooka blast knocks him flat on his back. When the smoke clears, the bear is standing over him and says,
"You're not doing this for the hunting, are you?"
My conscious mind is more disconnected from my natural human feelings and my natural human motives and agendas than most people's is. As best as I can tell, that makes it more difficult for me to motivate myself to do things that any sane person would agree I need to do regardless of the details of what my goals or motives are. But also, as best as I can tell, my conscious mind is also significantly less prone to self-deception than most people's is. (And yes, I realize that in this community, that is a boast.) The fact that the conscious mind tended t...
I like how you've identified the subtle value judgment in a supposedly value-free scientific belief.
However, you lost me at the end here:
...But notice how the theory you choose also has serious political implications. Consider how each of the two ways of looking at the problem would treat this example:
A wealthy liberal is a member of many environmental organizations, and wants taxes to go up to pay for better conservation programs. However, she can't bring herself to give up her gas-guzzling SUV, and is usually too lazy to sort all her trash for recycling
A ton of recent work in social psychology and social neuroscience suggests that quite a bit of the 'public relations officer' in the brain is processed unconsciously. I'll probably write a post on this eventually.
I think there's also a short-term/long-term thing going on with your examples. The drunk really wants to drink in the moment; they just don't enjoy living with the consequences later. Similarly, in the moment, you really do want to continue reading Reddit; it's only hours or days later that you wish you had also managed to complete that other project which was your responsibility.
I bet there's something going on here, about maximizing integrated lifetime happiness, vs. in-the-moment decision-making, possibly with great discounts to those future selves who will suffer the negative effects.
The Cynic's Theory may in fact describe a true state of mind, but it is not describing akrasia. The Cynic's Theory might better describe those minds whose preferences are placed by exterior influences that conflict with their internal, consciously hidden preferences. An example may be someone who always thought they wanted to be a doctor but deep down knew they wanted to be an artist.
However, when I think of Akrasia, I don't think of incompatible goals or hidden preferences, I think of compatible goals but an inability to consciously exert control of y...
I realized as soon as I commented that the quote you opened with was too simplistic, that there was more than one possible explanation for "akrasia". I expanded it into a post on my blog, here - http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/08/akrasia-as-revealed-preference.html . (I tried posting things on Less Wrong twice, neither time did I get any comments or votes, so I don't even know if I did it right, so that anyone else could even see them. )
EDIT: I still don't believe in akrasia as lack of willpower or weakness of will, just that there are more confounding preferences than just signaling preferences.
So why prefer one theory over the other?
I doubt it is necessary to need to choose one or the other. I would imagine that both theories could be well represented in the population.
Conscious minds are potentially rational, informed by morality, and qualia-laden. Unconscious minds aren't, so who cares what they think?
Are you suggesting that unconscious motivation cannot be changed by the "rational" conscious? I would argue that any significant behavioral modification is doing exactly this. One example that I think demonstrates this well is ma...
Often in psychotherapy a person's goal is to resolve a conflict between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind in favor of the conscious mind. You may hear it called an irrational unconscious belief. Someone may unconsciously feel unworthy of respect and acceptance but they consciously believe that this is irrational. What is interesting is that psychotherapy can work exactly as desired if the logic of the unconscious belief can be made fully conscious. It will not happen through mere deduction however. It has to be done by consciously accepting...
I mostly agree, but there's another criterion to consider: would the person feel better after following their conscious preferences, or after following their revealed preferences?
After I spend the whole afternoon lying in bed with my laptop idly browsing the Web/watching sitcoms/etc., I feel much, much worse than if I had noticed I was wasting my time, shut my laptop down, taken a nap, and then done something fulfilling. So, in that case, it's my conscious preferences that are right. (This doesn't happen that often now that I have LeechBlock installed.)
OTO...
When I am feeling poorly, there is a part of my mind that seem to be able to veto pretty much any activity I am engaged in except for primitive motor actions. The activities that get the veto seem to be the kinds of activities that would scare or repel a small boy. Even when I don't feel particularly poorly, my trying to do something extremely scary or repellent to the little boy will probably draw a veto.
The part with the veto power, which I sometimes refer to as the Saboteur, seems to be able to flush my working memory. For example, it can cause me to...
I propose that everyone who claims to believe in the Cynic's Theory self-modify to lack any conscious signalling system, or to stop caring what signals others receive from them in any deep way. Perhaps brain surgery to achieve their desired sociopathy?
Except nobody does that, so their revealed preference from not becoming sociopaths is to side with their conscious mind over their unconscious one.
Does it even have to go as far as concious vs unconcious mind?
As the saying goes, do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
The drunk in your example is far more likely failing on a much simpler level: not taking long term considerations into account, not updating when steps taken to stop drinking fail to work, and therefore not trying a different approach, repeating the same triggers (like going to the bar) and expecting too much out of his willpower reserves, and so on. Being drunk also hampers efforts.
Perhaps akrasia sufferers ...
I don't like the idea of becoming the kind of entity that consistently decides not to do the fun frivolous thing.
If a general decides that it's more strategically important to defend a particular bridge than a particular city, He could self modify so that he no longer cares about the city, so that those desires don't get in the way of defending the bridge. He can only do that so many times before he no longer cares about the nation, just 'defending' it.
I suppose I can only make my point if you often have the same experience, or if you've caught someone else fighting akrasia when they didn't know you were there.
Indeed. But as you say, it's mostly whether you identify more strongly with the part of you that wants X (a drink, a cigarette, or, in my case, a bag of Utz Medley chips...) or the part of you that wants to be sober or healthy.
It's not uncommon for me to say, "Hey, I want X!" and then after my actions reveal that I didn't want X as much as something else, to say, "Wow, I guess I ...
Excellent point.
However, neuro professionals seem to prefer more complex explanations, and avoid using the term unconscious.
To me the theory that seems most consistent with research and my personal experience is that we have multiple selves (self modes/ego states/roles etc.), and only one of them is active at any time. Single continuous consciousness or self is an illusion of the mind.
Each self has it's own will. For example one self can decide to wake up early. If another self is active when we wake up, it can decide to do something else. Being consistent...
We do not have to choose between these two theories. Sometimes the conscious goals are best, and the unconscious procrastinates in an undesirable fashion. Sometimes the unconscious is doing what is best, while consciousness struggles to cover the actions with a veneer of acceptability, for example by dissassociating itself from them.
I never consciously think "Wow, I really like browsing Reddit...but I'll trick everyone else into thinking I'd rather be studying so I get more respect. Ha ha! The fools will never see it coming!"
I do (well, not Reddit ... I'm supposed to be studying now, in fact.) OTOH, when I genuinely decide "OK, enough, we actually need to study now" then I feel akrasia, which is quite a different sensation to deciding "eh, I can manage without studying as long as people expect me to."
So, y'know, evidence.
You misremember my position. I have not argued that the unconscious is right and the conscious wrong. I have argued (e.g., here) for trying to find a compromise to make peace between the conflicting parts of yourself. At the last OB/LW meetup I argued this point in person to several people, all of whom instead favored vigilant internal war.
Sorry. Corrected.
Related to: Cynicism in Ev Psych and Econ
In Finding the Source, a commenter says:
I have begun wondering whether claiming to be victim of 'akrasia' might just be a way of admitting that your real preferences, as revealed in your actions, don't match the preferences you want to signal (believing what you want to signal, even if untrue, makes the signals more effective).
I think I've seen Robin put forth something like this argument [EDIT: Something related, but very different], and TGGP points out that Brian Caplan explicitly believes pretty much the same thing1:
I've previously argued that much - perhaps most - talk about "self-control" problems reflects social desirability bias rather than genuine inner conflict.
Part of the reason why people who spend a lot of time and money on socially disapproved behaviors say they "want to change" is that that's what they're supposed to say.
Think of it this way: A guy loses his wife and kids because he's a drunk. Suppose he sincerely prefers alcohol to his wife and kids. He still probably won't admit it, because people judge a sinner even more harshly if he is unrepentent. The drunk who says "I was such a fool!" gets some pity; the drunk who says "I like Jack Daniels better than my wife and kids" gets horrified looks. And either way, he can keep drinking.
I'll call this the Cynic's Theory of Akrasia, as opposed to the Naive Theory. I used to think it was plausible. Now that I think about it a little more, I find it meaningless. Here's what changed my mind.
What part of the mind, exactly, prefers a socially unacceptable activity (like drinking whiskey or browsing Reddit) to an acceptable activity (like having a wife and kids, or studying)? The conscious mind? As Bill said in his comment, it doesn't seem like it works this way. I've had akrasia myself, and I never consciously think "Wow, I really like browsing Reddit...but I'll trick everyone else into thinking I'd rather be studying so I get more respect. Ha ha! The fools will never see it coming!"
No, my conscious mind fully believes that I would rather be studying2. And this even gets reflected in my actions. I've tried anti-procrastination techniques, both successfully and unsuccessfully, without ever telling them to another living soul. People trying to diet don't take out the cupcakes as soon as no one else is looking (or, if they do, they feel guilty about it).
This is as it should be. It is a classic finding in evolutionary psychology: the person who wants to fool others begins by fooling themselves. Some people even call the conscious mind the "public relations officer" of the brain, and argue that its entire point is to sit around and get fooled by everything we want to signal. As Bill said, "believing the signals, even if untrue, makes the signals more effective."
Now we have enough information to see why the Cynic's Theory is equivalent to the Naive Theory.
The Naive Theory says that you really want to stop drinking, but some force from your unconscious mind is hijacking your actions. The Cynic's Theory says that you really want to keep drinking, but your conscious mind is hijacking your thoughts and making you think otherwise.
In both cases, the conscious mind determines the signal and the unconscious mind determines the action. The only difference is which preference we define as "real" and worthy of sympathy. In the Naive Theory, we sympathize with the conscious mind, and the problem is the unconscious mind keeps committing contradictory actions. In the Cynic's Theory, we symapthize with the unconscious mind, and the problem is the conscious mind keeps sending out contradictory signals. The Naive say: find some way to make the unconscious mind stop hijacking actions! The Cynic says: find some way to make the conscious mind stop sending false signals!
So why prefer one theory over the other? Well, I'm not surprised that it's mostly economists who support the Cynic's Theory. Economists are understandably interested in revealed preferences3, because revealed preferences are revealed by economic transactions and are the ones that determine the economy. It's perfectly reasonable for an economist to care only about those and dimiss any other kind of preference as a red herring that has to be removed before economic calculations can be done. Someone like a philosopher, who is more interested in thought and the mind, might be more susceptible to the identify-with-conscious-thought Naive Theory.
But notice how the theory you choose also has serious political implications4. Consider how each of the two ways of looking at the problem would treat this example:
A wealthy liberal is a member of many environmental organizations, and wants taxes to go up to pay for better conservation programs. However, she can't bring herself to give up her gas-guzzling SUV, and is usually too lazy to sort all her trash for recycling.
I myself throw my support squarely behind the Naive Theory. Conscious minds are potentially rational5, informed by morality, and qualia-laden. Unconscious minds aren't, so who cares what they think?
Footnotes:
1: Caplan says that the lack of interest in Stickk offers support for the Cynic's Theory, but I don't see why it should, unless we believe the mental balance of power should be different when deciding whether to use Stickk than when deciding whether to do anything else.
Caplan also suggests in another article that he has never experienced procrastination as akrasia. Although I find this surprising, I don't find it absolutely impossible to believe. His mind may either be exceptionally well-integrated, or it may send signals differently. It seems within the range of normal human mental variation.
2: Of course, I could be lying here, to signal to you that I have socially acceptable beliefs. I suppose I can only make my point if you often have the same experience, or if you've caught someone else fighting akrasia when they didn't know you were there.
3: Even the term "revealed preferences" imports this value system, as if the act of buying something is a revelation that drives away the mist of the false consciously believed preferences.
4: For a real-world example of a politically-charged conflict surrounding the question of whether we should judge on conscious or unconscious beliefs, see Robin's post Redistribution Isn't About Sympathy and my reply.
5: Differences between the conscious and unconscious mind should usually correspond to differences between the goals of a person and the "goals" of the genome, or else between subgoals important today and subgoals important in the EEA.