Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

144 J HOW THE MIND WORKScollection of partly finished drafts, says Daniel Dennett, who adds, "It's amistake to look for the President in the Oval Office of the brain."The society of mind is a wonderful metaphor, and I will use it withgusto when explaining the emotions. But the theory can be taken too farif it outlaws any system in the brain charged with giving the reiris or thefloor to one of the agents at a time. The agents of the brain might verywell be organized hierarchically into nested subroutines with a set ofmaster decision rules, a computational demon or agent or good-kind-ofhomunculus,sitting at the top of the chain of command. It would not bea ghost in the machine, just another set of if-then rules or a neural networkthat shunts control to the loudest, fastest, or strongest agent onelevel down.We even have hints about the brain structures that house the decision-makingcircuitry. The neurologist Antonio Damasio has noted thatdamage to the anterior cingulate sulcus, which receives input from manyhigher perceptual areas and is connected to the higher levels of themotor system, leaves a patient in a seemingly alert but strangely unresponsivestate. The report led Francis Crick to proclaim, only partly injest, that the seat of the will had been discovered. And for many decadesneurologists have known that exercising the will—forming and carryingout plans-—is a job of the frontal lobes. A sad but typical example cameto me from a man who called about his fifteen-year-old son, who had sufferedan injury to his frontal lobes in a car accident. The boy would stayin the shower for hours at a time, unable to decide when to get out, andcould not leave the house because he kept looping back to his room tocheck whether he had turned off the lights.Why would a society of mental agents need an executive at the top?The reason is as clear as the old Yiddish expression "You can't dance attwo weddings with only one tuches." No matter how many agents wehave in our minds, we each have exactly one body. Custody of eachmajor part must be granted to a controller that selects a plan from thehubbub of competing agents. The eyes have to point at one object at atime; they can't fixate on the empty space halfway between two interestingobjects or wobble between them in a tug-of-war. The limbs must bechoreographed to pull the body or objects along a path that attains thegoal of just one of the mind's agents. The alternative, a truly egalitariansociety of mind, is shown in the wonderfully silly movie All of Me. LilyTomlin is a hypochondriac heiress who hires a swami to transfer her soulinto the body of a woman who doesn't want hers. During the transfer, a