The Mind is Flat

Prologue: Literary Depth, Mental Shallows

• The inner, mental world, and the beliefs, motives, and fears it is supposed to contain is, itself, a work of the imagination. We invent interpretations of ourselves and other people in the flow of experience, just as we conjure up interpretations of fictional characters from a flow of written text.
• There is no pre-existing "inner world of thought" from which our thoughts issue. Thoughts, like fiction, come into existence in the instant that they are invented, and not a moment before.
• Introspection is a process not of perception but of invention: the real-time generation of interpretations and explanations to make sense of our own words and actions. The inner world is a mirage.
• The very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behavior as coherent as possible - to stay "in character" as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by referring to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past.
• There is no inner world. Our flow of momentary conscious experience is not the sparkling surface of a vast sea of thought - it is all there is.
• Our brain creates new momentary thoughts and experiences by drawing not on a hidden inner world of knowledge, beliefs, and motives, but on memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences.
• Our brain is an engine that creates momentary conscious interpretations not be drawing on hidden inner depths, but by linking the present with the past, just as writing a novel involves linking its sentences together coherently, rather than creating an entire world.
• The whole of thought, whether chess-playing, abstract mathematical reasoning, or artistic and literary creation, is really no more than an extension of perception.
• Our freedom consists not in the ability magically to transform ourselves in a single jump, but to reshape our thoughts and behaviors, one step at a time: our current thoughts and actions are continually, if slowly, reprogramming our minds.
• Common-sense psychology sees our thought and behavior as rooted in reasoning, but a lot of human intelligence seems to be a matter of finding complex patterns.

Part One: The Illusion of Mental Depth

1. The Power of Invention

• The attempt to draw a map, or build a model, of Gormenghast Castle leads to inconsistency and confusion - the descriptions of great hallways and battlements, libraries and kitchens, networks of passages and vast, almost deserted wings can't be reconciled. They are as tangled and self-contradictory as the inhabitants of the castle itself.
• Creating a fictional place is a bit like setting a crossword. Each description provides another clue to the layout of the castle, city, or country being imagined. But as the number of clues increases, knitting them together successfully soon becomes extraordinarily difficult - indeed it rapidly becomes impossible, both for Gormenghast's readers and for Peake himself.
• Stories have to make sense in so many ways: through consistency of plot, character, and a myriad of details.
• With fictional worlds, avoiding inconsistency requires incredible vigilance.
• Even the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Peake are notable too for their sparseness. In real life, everyone has a specific birthday, fingerprint and an exact number of teeth. In fictional worlds, most characters have none of these properties, or any of a million others, whether significant or trivial.
• Anna Karenina's mind is just as vaguely sketched as her body.
• The two characteristics of fiction: Inconsistency and sparseness.
• Whereas the fictional Anna is a sketchy and contradictory character created by Tolstoy's brain, a real Anna would be an equally sketchy and contradictory character, created by her own brain.
• Our beliefs, values, emotions, and other mental traits are, I suggest, as tangled, self-contradictory and incompletely spelled out as the labyrinths of Gormenghast Castle. It is in this very concrete sense that characters are all fictional, including our own. Inconsistency and sparseness are not just characteristics of fiction. They are also the hallmarks of mental life.
• In the work on AI mental systems, at no stage have human beliefs been successfully mined or common-sense theories reconstructed.
• People can fluently generate verbal explanations and justifications of their thoughts and actions; and, whenever parts of those explanations are queried, out will tumble further verbal explanation or justification. But analysis of these streams, however long they continue, shows that they are little more than a series of loosely connected fragments:
  • Chess grandmasters can't really explain how they play chess.
  • Doctors can't explain how they diagnose patients
  • None of us can remotely explain how we understand the everyday world of people and objects. What we say sounds like explanation - but really it is a terrible jumble that we are making up as we go along.
• As we try to explain a natural phenomenon or social situation, each explanation seems to be new, different and typically incompatible with the last one, rather then following from a single set of underlying principles - the explanations of every new scenario just seem to run off on all directions, apparently without limit. Moreover, each step in each explanation can itself be queried. Why does water tend to find a level? Why do ballbearings bounce off each other? Why does sugar change consistency as it enters the bucket of water? And so on.
• Our explanations have holes everywhere and inconsistencies abound. Psychologists talk of the "illusion of explanatory depth" for the bizarre contrast between our feeling of understanding and our inability to produce cogent explanations.
• Whether explaining how a freidge works, how to steer a bicycle, or the origin of tides, we have a feeling of understanding which seems wildly out of balance with the mangles and self-contradictory explanations we actually come up with.
• Our verbal explanations of the physical world - but equally of the social, economic worlds or our moral or aesthetic judgements - turn out not to be a confused description of inner clarity, but a confused description of inner confusion.
• Our verbal explanations and justifications are not reports of stable, pre-formed building blocks of knowledge, coherent theories over which we reason, deep in an inner mental world. They are ad hoc, provisional, and invented on the spot.
• We have vastly underestimated our powers of invention. Our inner oracle is such a good storyteller - so fluent and convincing - that it fools us completely. But the mental depths our mind conjures up are no more real than the world of Gormenghast or Middle Earth. The mind is flat: our mental surface, the momentary thoughts, explanations, and sensory experiences that make up our stream of consciousness is all there is to mental life.
• The analytic tradition in philosophy tried to get language and meaning straight, as a crucial stepping-stone to launch an indirect attack on big philosophical questions, but it did not work.
• Even the structural patterns observed in language - not just its meaning - are a jumble of inconsistent regularities, sub-regularities, and outright exceptions.
• Countless experiences in psychology and behavioral economics have shown just how spectacularly ill-defined and self-contradictory our beliefs and preferences are.
• People routinely supply wildly different answers to exactly the same question even within a few minutes, and their answers to different questions are often inconsistent.
• We may or may not have strong opinions, but these opinions don't - and could not possibly - spring from coherent and fully spelt-out common-sense theories.
• From the perspective of the arts, literature, and humanities, there is a long tradition of seeing people and their actions as the subjects of conflicting, fragmented, and endlessly recreated interpretation. But viewing psychology as part of the arts and humanities is to react to the illusion of mental depth in, I think, precisely the wrong way. A science of the mind requires understanding how the engine of improvisation that is the core of human intelligence can be constructed out of the machinery of the human brain.