Two Minds Blog

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 multip...

  Consider the octopus: Around 300 species of this animal inhabit Earth's oceans, ranging in size from under 1 pound (the star-sucker pygmy octopus) to perhaps 600 pounds with an armspan of 30 feet (a monster-sized  giant Pacific octopus reported by a Canadian commercial diver in the 1950s; 300 pounds and 20 feet is probably more typical). The octopus has no solid parts except for its beak, and can therefore compress its body and arms into extremely small or narrow places. That allows it to take advantage of various dens where it spends its time, which can be anything from a tide pool to a deep-sea rock crevice. The octopus has eyes, but its primary sensory mechanism is a mix of touch and chemical-based smell or taste, both of which are communicated via the suckers on its arms. The eyes even have a lens-focusing "camera" mechanism similar to that of vertebrates, even though they evolved down a completely separate evolutionary path. Octopi are generally seen as intelligen...

We think of the Intuitive system as representing emotion, or impulse, or other negative attributes. But Plato and Aristotle also attributed positive functions such as love, empathy, duty, and honor to the Intuitive Mind. These examples show us that the Intuitive Mind isn't just one thing. Rather than describing it as a system, it may be more accurate to describe the Intuitive Mind as a set  of systems.  Evans and Stanovich (2009) suggested that Intuitive Mind activities have the common characteristic of autonomy , meaning that they are self-executing without a person paying any conscious attention to them. (This is clearly different from Narrative Mind activities, which require ongoing focus to maintain them). Some examples of autonomous mental processes are: jumping when you hear a loud noise (instinctive behavior), turning off your alarm when you wake up (Pavlovian learned behavior), checking for coins in the vending machine change drop (Skinnerian reinforced behavior), rem...

Robot football players at a Valparaiso University College of Engineering event I have been thinking lately about robots, which creates an interesting asymmetry: They almost certainly have not been thinking about me. Nevertheless, I find that I often respond  to robots as though they have thoughts about me, or about their own personal goals, or about the world in which they exist. That tendency suggests an interesting aspect of human psychology, connected to our social minds . We are hard-wired to care what other people think about us, and we very easily extend that concern to robots. Here's a recent article about how the language-learning app Duolingo, which features an owl-shaped avatar (a kind of robot), uses "emotional blackmail" to keep application users engaged:  https://uxdesign.cc/20-days-of-emotional-blackmail-from-duolingo-4f566523e3c5  This bird-shaped bit of code tells users things like "you're scaring me!" and "I miss you" if they haven...

Whichever side of the aisle we were on, the 2024 election results surprised many of us. A lot of people I talk to are simply wondering "what does this mean?" We wonder, as we would in any election, what the results mean for our future. We wonder what it means about our neighbors, whether the things we want are the same things that they want. And because questions of character were important for many people in this particular election, we wonder what it means about ourselves — as in this question that I keep hearing: "Is this really who we are now?" These are deep, existential types of questions, so it's no wonder that many people are struggling to make sense of them. One way to consider the situation is to take seriously the idea (from Eric Schwitzgebel ) that America itself is a conscious entity. Schwitzgebel’s technical argument is about complexity -- America has a structure with a high level of organization, integration among its parts, specialization of func...

  Fatigue is one of the most common symptom experiences, both among people with chronic illnesses and among healthy adults. Unfortunately, it's one with no easy medical solution: Caffeine helps in the short term, but its effects aren't as restorative as sleep. And the same factors that cause fatigue can also interfere with getting restful sleep or true recovery. Unfortunately, this post isn't going to be about how to reduce fatigue; instead, it's about what happens in the brain when we are tired. We're all likely to be fatigued at some point, so it might be useful to understand how that affects us. A 2022 study using fMRI brain scan technology found that the amount of inter-connection between different parts of the brain tended to decrease after people completed a cognitively demanding task. That this means is that the conscious, deliberate, Narrative Mind becomes isolated from the Intuitive Mind that actually controls behavior. Similarly, a 2021 study showed that ...

  In my blog post on Nudges , I talked about why grocery stores sell higher-profit items at eye level (because people are more likely to buy those). That's an example of "design architecture," defined as environmental structures that encourage or discourage particular forms of behavior. NPR's Planet Money  podcast highlighted another form of design architecture in a recent episode : package size.  After many years of offering only a few standardized sizes for their products, manufacturers have begun selling the same products in a much wider range of packages. Coca-Cola was a pioneer in this area of marketing, launching tiny cans for health-conscious consumers and also giant bottles for families and parties. The price of the actual soda can vary along with its package size: People are actually willing to pay a higher price per ounce when the can or bottle is smaller, because of the perception of convenience or health benefits. But size can also have an effect on how m...