Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?

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.

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.

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 real entity; it's not a "mind", in the anthropomorphic sense. It's just whatever you're not paying attention to right now, that keeps on going. If you pay attention to your breathing or your heart rate you can learn to control them. If you pay attention to your feet you'll know where they are right now. And if you pay attention to what you actually get from your "akrasic" behavior, you'll realize it's something you genuinely want.

What you haven't been doing, is negotiating fairly among all your "interests" (to use Ainslie's jargon), or cleanly prioritizing your "controlled variables" (to use Powers's).

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.

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.

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 to serve in the EEA as the public-relations officer of the mind does not in any way make it less probable that every human is completely dependent on the conscious mind for rationality -- at least the kind of rationality necessary for science, philanthropy and effective pursuit of long-term self-interest.

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.

Either side would say(after becoming sufficiently informed and thinking about the issue long enough):

"Ms. SUV Liberal's consumption makes no noticeable difference to the environment. The only way to achieve her environment goals is through collective action -- i.e., add a 'cooperation enforcement mechanism' to this Prisoner's Dilemma. Otherwise, individual 'cooperation' (reducing fuel consumption, recycling, etc.) simply rewards everyone else who 'defects', and the desired state of 'sustainable global society' is an unstable node.

"Ms. SUV Liberal's decision to drive an SUV and not recycle might have symbolic value, but that dynamic was not the focus of your example, and therefore, her driving of an SUV is not holding back progress toward her professed goal saving the environment."

Is there another political example you can give?

I myself throw my support squarely behind the Naive Theory. Conscious minds are potentially rational, informed by morality, and qualia-laden. Unconscious minds aren't, so who cares what they think?

Because of your clarification in footnote 5, I agree with the point you're making here, but I think you've spoken too broadly. Unconscious minds do a lot of difficult, useful cognitive labor: pattern recognition, regularity detection, and yes, even value judgments. While we'll often be able to identify where the unconscious mind is not acting optimally, that's a far cry from "who cares what the unconscious thinks".

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 your willpower in achieving the agreed upon goals. When you finally stop procrastinating and get going, you feel wonderful and wonder why you couldn't have done it sooner--but then you go through the same problem the next time again. Akrasia is a problem of forming/eliminating automatic behaviors, aka habits. So in my opinion, the Cynic's theory does not shed any light on the problem of akrasia.

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 martial arts training. In the beginning the trainee unconsciously flinches and turns away from an oncoming threat while the trained expert tracks and deflects the threat unconsciously.

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 the feeling that results from the unconscious belief and embracing it. Then the unconscious logic can be clarified. The conscious mind has resources to test the veracity and validity of unconscious beliefs. The unconscious itself cannot do this. So an unconscious belief will usually remain unchanged even if one is aware that it is problematic. It is the psychological equivalent of debugging faulty code. The code will not change just because the user is frustrated by it. It will only change if a programmer edits it and runs the edited version in place of the faulty version. That is the major obstacle in psychotherapy. It is getting the code into the editor, so to speak. The logical flaws in irrational unconscious beliefs are not difficult to see. They are usually obvious. What is difficult is getting them clear in consciousness. It doesn't happen naturally. That is why things like mindfulness and Gendlin's Focusing are considered very useful by many psychotherapists. The real obstacle is the making conscious of the implicit unconscious beliefs.

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.)

OTOH, when three days before an exam a friend of mine phoned me and said, “What are you doing tonight? Don't tell me you're staying home to study, 'cause I know that when you do that you end up spending all of the time on Facebook”, I didn't answer “Yes, I'm staying home to study, and no, I've replaced my Facebook password with a random one and mailed it to myself in the future so I won't be able to log in until then”, and I did go out with them; and three days later I aced the exam all the same (even in spite of this). So in that occasion, my revealed preferences were right, and following through with my plan to outsmart myself (i.e. staying home and study, with myself locked out of Facebook) would have been a net negative (i.e. I wouldn't have done better at the exam, but I would have missed the night out).

ISTM that the former scenario (conscious and revealed preferences disagreeing, with the former being right) is waaay more common than the latter. Unless you go overboard with precommitment devices, as I've been doing lately!

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 forget where I put something I had in my hand a moment ago. The thing I had in my hand tends to be something I need to continue with the activity the little boy is trying to veto. If the little boy is putting up a particularly strong fight, then after I retrieve the item, I often find to my amazement that (for no good reason that I can imagine) I have put it down (again) in a different place, but (again) even though I just put it down, I cannot recall where. I recall going through four cycles of misplacing an item and retrieving it, one cycle right after the other. I have some brain damage, which probably significantly impairs my working memory, and I am currently very confused about how many of these "sabotage incidents" would have happened if I had not incurred the brain damage. Obviously, if none of them would have happened if I had not incurred the brain damage, "sabotage incident" is a misnomer, and I am assigning an agenda or a motive to cognitive impairments that in reality have no agenda or motive behind them. I frequently forget why I got up out my chair. I frequently forget whether the pills I just swallowed contain important pill X. Most of these failures of working memory have no rebellious or sabotaging motive behind them: the question is whether some of them do. If the reader has any insights into this, I am all ears.

When I say that the kinds of things that seem to get a veto seem to be the kinds of things that would scare a young boy, the reader will tend to start to suspect that I had a brutalizing childhood, and the reader would be right.

I seem to be in a mood for self-disclosure today. I publish this only because Richard Hollerith is an alias that I do not plan to use for, e.g., job hunting and because I made a note to re-read this comment at a later date to re-consider whether I want it on the public internet. I ask everyone not to quote the personal parts of this comment because of course if I do decide to delete or prune the original, I would be unable to delete the quotes.

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 here have cause to look for a conciousness-based explanation, but only because they have presumably gone through the list of biases and failiure methods and applied rational ways of correcting them. This is not true in the general case of an ordinary human.

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 was wrong and didn't really want X."

Edit: my point here is that almost everyone sometimes has the experience of not knowing what they want, so it's easy to say that people also often have incorrect beliefs about their own preferences.

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 is not so much about will power, but about which self is active.

You can start to control your behavior better by first observing which self is active at any time, and later trying to control that, and not being identified by harmful selves, in other words by increasing your meta-cognitive capabilities.

You could say that your consciousness (or level of consciousness) increases when you are conscious about your consciousness. This is really very difficult, and in the beginning you can do only for short moments before you forget to be second-degree conscious again.

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.

Nice.