As usual, I am ending the year by taking a look back at where we have been on the Two Minds Blog in 2024, with some updates on recent topics.
- I wrote a few posts about unusual forms of consciousness, two of them drawing on the work of philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel. My most recent was about the psychology of octopi, who have a fascinating nervous system that's distributed among their 8 arms and allows the arms to operate semi-autonomously. You can read more about cephalopod consciousness here, and below is a great diagram of the octopus nervous system from Instagram:
I also wrote about the possibility (originally suggested by Schwitzgebel) that the United States is literally conscious. That piece came out right after the election, and was relatively popular -- I think because it suggested some concrete steps that we might be able to take to calm things down in our national awareness. I wrote about dissociative identity disorder, which is the experience of having multiple conscious "selves" that all share the same physical body. And finally, I wrote about split-brain patients, who have had the corpus callosum between their brain's left and right hemispheres severed (usually as a treatment for severe seizures), and who experience some unusual split consciousness as a result. All of these topics remain of interest, and I have some more posts planned for next year about the inexact relationships between our subjective experiences and objective reality (whatever that might be). - As artificial intelligence continues to develop, I also wrote a couple of posts about this technology and its implications for psychology. As the technology evolves, I’m sure there will be more to come on this front as well.
- One was titled "should your boss manage your emotions?" and focused on the use of AI to recognize (and attempt to modify) people's feelings. That strategy is still an active focus of investigation by researchers and business leaders, as in this recent article. The post generated quite a bit of reaction online, mostly from people horrified by the new possibilities for employer surveillance and control of employees.
- I also wrote a piece about how we humans perceive emotions in robots, and why that might present risks if someone decided to use our empathic tendencies against us. In an extreme version of manipulating people's emotional reactions, here's an example of an environmental art installation using an AI Jesus to hear confessions in a Catholic church!
- I also shared my daughter's college debate, in which she presented ways that AI use may interfere with students' learning. (I loved her presentation; but watch this space next week for a semi-contradictory position, as my thinking on the issue has continued to evolve).
- I had an interesting dialogue with a reader on ResearchGate who argued that taking the advice in my blog about robots might actually make us less empathic toward some of our fellow humans -- for instance, people with autism-spectrum conditions whose writing may be mistaken for AI writing by plagiarism-detection software. I have two responses to that concern: One is that we're pretty unempathic already toward our fellow humans, and we need to work on that across the board! The other is that this line of thought further emphasizes the need to focus on how AI is generating its responses, rather than looking at the responses themselves. The same point is made in this recent essay on the moral status of digital minds. My cautions rely on the assumption that AI models are not, in fact, conscious in the way that Blake Lemoine believed they were back in 2022. If their underlying structure doesn't fit with our understanding of consciousness, then it shouldn't matter how strongly the AI argues for its 'humanity.'
- Early this past year, I also wrote a piece about whether AI models ever could become conscious, and what it might take to achieve that. Because I'm not a materialist -- I don't think that consciousness arises from the physical "stuff" of the universe -- I'm fundamentally skeptical that they can. That helps to explain why I am willing to extend my view of consciousness to octopi (definitely) and to the United States (maybe), but not to AI.
- I also wrote several posts on features of the Intuitive Mind: For example, the fact that it is able to multitask effectively even though our Narrative Minds are not; the unconscious "cookie jar effect" of package size on our consumption behavior; and the "Mardi Gras effect" of disinhibited behavior in one area as a tool to support self-control in other areas. I also suggested that if we want to see more ethical behavior in ourselves and others, we would do better to tap into Intuitive-level processes like social pressure or moral feelings rather than rational arguments. All of these examples highlight the importance of understanding the Intuitive Mind if we want to make changes in human behavior. The post about multitasking generated some discussion -- I'd like to be clear that I don't think people can safely stare at their phone while also attempting to drive, but I do think we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and also that we can effectively learn from a podcast while folding laundry. The trick is to do things simultaneously that activate different channels or subsystems in the brain, most of which operate outside of consciousness. The online critique that I received seems to have resulted from a discrepancy in what we mean by "conscious thought," with some people interpreting conscious as simply "awake" as opposed to "using language, mediated through the Narrative System" which is my meaning here. The Narrative Mind really cannot multitask, which is one of its great weaknesses compared to the Intuitive Mind. The other weakness of the Narrative Mind is that it's slow, a feature pointed out by the late, great psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who I wrote about in April.
- Over the summer, I had a mini-series of posts about human strengths. I wrote about how great "genius" might relate more strongly to deliberate practice than to innate talent or divine inspiration, although I also looked at the empirical links between great artistic talent and mental health conditions like bipolar disorder. I wrote about willpower, and about using Intuitive-Mind capabilities to avoid being deceived by liars. (If you put this post next to the one about robots, it seems like I was particularly concerned about being deceived in 2024!). Finally, I wrote about the decline of liberal-arts majors in colleges across the U.S., and the benefits that we might gain from studying arts and humanities.
- Several posts this year were again connected to mental health, including one about the linkages between physical and mental symptoms in Long COVID syndrome. I expressed my admiration for the support mechanisms included in the secondary-education "Sources of Strength" curriculum, which tap into the Intuitive Mind to support teenagers' mental health. In counterpoint to that post, I also had a blog post about the deleterious effects of social media on teenagers' mental health. That topic was much discussed this year because of Jonathan Haidt's new book The Anxious Generation, which I have been enjoying reading over the Christmas break. I have some more on that topic planned for early next year.
- As usual, I had a few posts about behavior-change techniques, including one about relapse prevention and the abstinence violation effect; one about the history of checklists as a simple behavior-change technology; and one about a leading cognitive theory of change, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and why I think it doesn't completely do the job of predicting people's behavior. I have a related post scheduled for early next year, looking at Lazarus and Folkman's Coping Theory and how it stacks up against Two Minds ideas.
- Finally, in the area of "ongoing research," I wrote a post about the differential effects of fatigue on the Narrative and Intuitive minds, phenomena that we see in my colleague Mustafa Ozkaynak's ongoing study of Two-Minds effects of fatigue on ER nurses. I shared a fish story from my own experience with Regenerating Images in Memory, an imagery-based psychotherapeutic approach that I'm currently studying with colleagues at CU. I shared a student's paper on people's reasons for and against exercise based on Two Minds Theory, which came out of an HIV and exercise project with Dr. Kristine Erlandson. And I wrote about continuous glucose monitoring based on a study that I'm working on with CU Medicine colleagues and Dr. Steve Voida at CU Boulder about self-management by adolescents with type 1 diabetes. All four of those studies are still active, with more papers and follow-up work planned for 2025, so they are also likely to return as topics of future blogs.
Thank you for reading the Two Minds Blog in 2024! I appreciate everyone who takes time to send a response to one of my posts, whether positive or negative. I want you to know that I do think carefully about alternate ideas that my readers might present. Although I think Two Minds Theory is pretty good, the purpose of this blog is not to defend my ideas, but to explore their implications and thereby to make them even stronger. As I have argued repeatedly in this space, peer review and dialogue are two of our greatest methods for discovering the truth of something. And additionally, it's just nice to know that someone out there took time to read my work! I wish you peace and good health as we close out 2024, and look forward to sharing more thoughts about psychology with you over the coming year.
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