Explanations entail the ability to choose between languages, and to correct for the skewing of meaning that is inherent in language. Thus, when a physicist refers to billiard ball atoms or cosmic string, the reader knows that such images are metaphorical rather than literal entities. By constantly interposing different levels of interpretation, any confusion that the reader may have regarding what is fact and what is analogy is corrected. Moreover, as our modern tools provide a fine grain mapping of the empirical facts that underlie reality, from atoms to genetic mutations, accepted ‘facts’ can easily morph from being literally true to being only metaphorically true. Thus the concept of a fixed entity called time is demonstrated as being merely relative, and the feel of a stationary earth is belied by the fact that it actually moves. The transience or relativity of truth can only be determined through relating different truths and the perspectives that create them.

Experiences can be true on one level (time passes and is absolute) and false on another (time does not pass and is relative) or vice versa depending upon one’s purposes. But the ability to compare and shift between levels also corrects for the metaphors in other levels that are not only false relative to where you are, but are false wherever you are. So the ability to gauge the relativity of truth simultaneously empowers us to judge the falseness of ‘truths’, with the result that we can relegate looping suns and divine creation to myth.

Now this definition of explanation is perfectly sensible and necessary for the physical and biological sciences, but is hardly if ever applied to the social sciences. Indeed, ‘explanation’ in the social sciences is precisely the same that served science so poorly in the advent of the revolutions that successively overturned centuries old models of how the world worked. To a medieval mind, explanation implied processes that were literal and linear. After all, since God or other inanimate spirits had an ultimate hand in moving things, such spiritual processes were by nature irreducible to component parts. So divine intervention was the unquestioned means whereby the planets moved, and to question that fact was unnecessary, fruitless, or even sacrilege. Similarly, the mental processes or faculties that drive behavior are practically irreducible, and any deconstruction of ‘will’, ‘courage’, or ‘virtue’ is equally unnecessary, fruitless, or a sacrilege to the spirit of mankind.

The means that get us to the results we want, whether denoted in mathematical or alphabetical symbols is linguistic in nature. However, if these symbols denoted literal and linear processes, then nothing can be questioned, and nothing can be added. Whether mandated by tradition or holy writ, by never questioning our own language, we are left with only one language, and prediction alone becomes the only measure of success. Barring even these influences, the very fact that we are not in the habit of examining the linguistic content of our speech in itself commits us to a philosophical perspective that conflicts with the philosophy underlying the practice of science. Language of course is the perfect tool that gets you places, but getting places is not enough, one must understand. Science is comprised of not just the effort to continually refine one’s ability to predict results, but entails also a continuous questioning of the means that get you to those results. That is, its is not just prediction, but explanation. And how do you find good explanation? It’s as simple as taking a walk through a bookstore.

Take a walk through any bookstore, and stop briefly in the small (actually too small) section on science. You will immediately note the absence of books espousing flat earths, creation science, or space aliens. Instead, you will find a selection of highly referenced texts, written by respected theoreticians in their field, and almost all dedicated to explaining nature, from biology to physics. Popular science texts differ from textbooks in so far as explanation has primacy over prediction. Thus, one is never burdened with the complex equations, terminology, and logic that give a single-dimensional perspective to science as a technical discipline. Indeed, science as a technical discipline is too complex to practically bridge to the conventions of common speech. However, the metaphors of science can bridge to the vernacular, and that is what good science writing provides us. Thus, explanations of relativity convey the technical aspects of Einstein’s achievement through the images of speeding trains and rocket ships, and explanations of evolution make Darwin comprehensible through the colorful portrayal of the competitive dynamics among creatures, and the lineage of assorted flora and fauna.

Now take a walk among the endless shelves containing books on popular psychology, self-improvement, and the assorted musings that reintroduce semi-animistic concepts like past life regression, ESP, and ghostly visitations to a New Age. In contrast to the mind spinning circles of realities that science forces us to harmonize in our mind like recurring themes in a Bach fugue, popular psychology attributes behavior to processes that are simple, linear, and literal. Devoid of references, often penned by authors with PhD’s in ‘life experience’, and completely oblivious to the most rudimentary facts of neuropsychology, popular psychology provides not explanations, but rather strings of metaphors that shimmer with the implications of processes that are both literal and inferred.

Popular psychology, as well as much of the academic psychology it draws upon, doesn’t question the language it uses, but neither do the common sense constructions that we use to describe our worlds. Hence, it achieves face validity by virtue of its coherence with the ways we think. Thus, when a writer appeals to self-esteem, ego strength, higher consciousness and the like, these mental states are scarcely removed from the mental faculties we engage in our normal conversation. However, as scientific language is no mere variant of common sense language, neither should the language that purports to describe the logic behind the human psyche. Understanding requires more than merely pouring old wine into new bottles, or recasting common sense in new terminology. It requires different levels of analysis that at once simplify the complex and make more complex what seemed to be simple. This seeming paradox is revealed and resolved through a review of three mysterious mental ‘processes’ that have assumed an established place in the common vernacular.

It is the stuff of cheap Las Vegas acts, anti-smoking or weight loss scams, or bogus self-help books. It is ubiquitous and special, wholly inexplicable and near magical. It requires special words and procedures, engages a unique mental state, and allows one to transcend human nature itself. A heady resume indeed for a process that does not exist.

Franz Mesmer invented it, though magnetism was his thing. An 18^th century charlatan, Mesmer convinced a gullible public that the newly discovered magnetic force was just the thing to cure whatever ails you. Just pass yourself under a powerful magnet, and a harmonious ‘fluid flow’ would be achieved, hence removing the ‘obstacles’ that caused disease. Funny thing though, many of his patients actually found their symptoms alleviated, and more than a few thought themselves cured. Since diseases tend to run their course, treatment or no treatment, and since illnesses tend to get worse if we ruminate about them, it was no surprise that the resulting placebo effect would be interpreted as representing something much more profound. If Mesmer was known for the placebo effect, his inadvertent contribution to medical knowledge would be much more obscure. However, he added one more element that added his name to the lexicon, and a procedure and process that has retained its credibility to this day.

To be mesmerized, or in more modern terms, ‘hypnotized’, was an integral part of Mesmer’s therapeutic procedure. As an adjunct to the devices (which included magnets and even a glass harmonica!) that helped to achieve the right fluid flow, a trance state purged the obstacles caused the impairment of disease. The delirium and convulsions followed Mesmer’s artful suggestions, resulting finally in a relieved patient and a practitioner bowing to applause. This made for great theatre, as Mesmer and his patient’s unknowingly became the precursor to every hypnotic act, both stage and therapeutic to follow.

The postulation of a hypnotic state follows the fact that given the right setting, people can do some remarkable things that cannot be accounted for by the normal mental processes that we believe have governance over our behavior. Indeed, without the novelty and mystery it would scarcely be a process at all. Give a suggestion to a family member to mow the lawn, and whether they listen to you or not, its no great shakes. However, if out of frustration you told some loved one to jump in the lake or play in traffic, it would be a quite remarkable thing if he or she took you up on your offer. Of course, incongruity is relative, as your kin may have their own reasons. But hypnosis is more than a mysterious process that produces mysterious behaviors. Hypnosis also includes a set of procedures that induce it, and a unique mental or ‘trance’ state that opens the mind to suggestions. But is a trance state necessary for suggestion to take place or be more effective?

Fortunately, this is a very testable premise. Consider a rabbit’s foot. If rubbing a rabbit’s foot grants you luck, extra motivation, or God’s grace, then all you need do to prove the effectiveness of rabbit’s feet is to compare one group of people who rub rabbit’s feet to another group that does not. If the group that rubs rabbit feet is significantly more successful, lucky, or is able to walk on water, then there must be something to rabbit’s feet. On the other hand, if there is no difference between both groups, then it is safe to say that rabbit’s feet have no special power.

This is precisely the approach the psychologist Theodore X. Barber (1969) employed in a review of an exhaustive series of experiments that controlled for different aspects of the hypnotic induction procedure among thousands of subjects. In his book ‘Hypnosis: A Scientific Approach’, Barber found that the sole element that accounted for ‘hypnotic’ behavior, from seeming past life regression to increased sensory acuity to suggested anti-social behavior, was information derived from the experimental session that translated into positive expectancies for performance. Barber found that all of the behavioral phenomena normally associated with hypnosis could be produced among normally awake subjects, given the proper motivation of course. A ‘trance state’ was simply the behavioral equivalent of rubbing a rabbits foot, a voluntary hysteria that was no more biologically rooted to extraordinary behavior than the magically productive hysterics of a crying child.

Although Barber and succeeding researchers on hypnosis demonstrated that information could elicit a staggeringly wide repertoire of behaviors, these behaviors often extend beyond the more limited scope of what common sense informs us of our true capabilities. Hypnotic behaviors not only extend to commonplace voluntary behaviors, but to involuntary behaviors that otherwise seem immune to conscious control. Suggested physiological effects such as hallucinations, blindness, analgesia, etc. are all beyond the pale of our voluntary control, and beyond the scope of common sense. Hence one must either question common sense assumptions regarding behavior, or defer this complex question in favor of a special process that places an invisible mental gear in one’s brain to make it all work. Given a historical ignorance of the neuro-psychological processes that map to environmental information, it has been easy to refer extraordinary behavior to special processes. Thus, hypnotic states come in from the back door as a cipher for special processes that we cannot yet grasp.

So, the invocation of a hypnotic state, like a miracle that saves the equation, allows one to still make predictions, if you accept of course poor predictions. But because it denotes no unique neurological state, as an explanation it is impossible. Indeed, no neural state has ever been identified that can account for the extraordinary capabilities of people when confronted with information that is phrased just right. Nor is one needed, since the problem, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.

Like the observational anomalies that Brahe and others force fitted into geocentric scheme that just didn’t work, hypnotic behavior is an artifact of a common sense mental model that is just as unrealistic. But this model is just as ineffective for two other seemingly transcendent states that under the scrutiny of science hardly overarch human nature, but are simple aspects of a new and more realistic view of how human minds work.

It is transcendence on the cheap, and simple words are the key. Repeat them alone, and like Dorothy chanting Kansas, Kansas, Kansas, they will take you to new worlds, even though those worlds look like the same black and white homestead you just left. For believers though, meditation’s benefits are as countless as a patent medicine cure. Meditation has been claimed to raise consciousness, stimulate creativity, increase intelligence, reduce stress, reverse aging, fight disease, and promote self-actualization. It is a complex process dependent upon minimalist procedures. Attention after all is all it takes. But simple procedures are generic things, and need branding to be profitable. As generic aspirin or tap water can be transformed into unique elixirs with just the right marketing spin, a good label can have an aura that implicates special powers and demands special pricing. The Transcendental Meditation movement understood marketing was the better part of wisdom, and gave special words or mantras to each believer as keys to enlightenment in exchange for a small fee. A mantra had a special resonance that implicated special processes and special powers. Unfortunately, it didn’t do anything particularly special, at least when compared with folks who substituted nonsense words for the copyrighted sort. But not only was the meditative procedure not so special, its results were just as unremarkable.

In 1984, the psychologist David Holmes comprehensively reviewed the experimental literature on meditation that focused on comparisons between control and experimental subjects on a wealth of dependent measures such as heart rate, electrodermal activity, respiration rate, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, skin temperature, oxygen consumption, EMG activity, blood flow, and various biochemical factors. He found that the effects of meditation in controlling arousal did not reveal any differences between meditating and non-meditating (no treatment, anti-meditation, or relaxation) subjects. In short, meditation was no more effective or unique than simple resting, and the meditative state was relaxation and little more.

That focused attention in meditation leads merely to relaxation is an unremarkable finding, since if you sit alone and focus on mumbled nonsense words, you are essentially doing and thinking about nothing, and doing nothing has always been pretty relaxing. Of course, you can’t keep a good process down, as attention has been also enlisted to explain not only soporific meditative states, but also highly ecstatic and alert states that parallel creative and other demanding behavior. This so called ‘flow response’ was coined by the humanistic psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who discovered after interviewing thousands of artists, athletes, craftsmen, and other creative folk a common report of pleasure, interest, and even euphoria when engaged in tasks that matched ones skills.

If attention is doing double service as a doorway to relaxation and euphoric states, then one must either introduce a new mental process or processes to account for this distinction, or else a more refined definition of attention. Csikszentmihalyi opted for the former, and attributed flow to such obscure events as psychic energy, intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality, and self-actualization, but ignored in his multiple books and papers on the topic even the most glancing consideration of its physiological correlates. In other words, in his relentless poetic rendering of the experience, he neglected the ‘minor’ point of providing an explanation for it. Of course, anything remotely approaching an explanation for flow would have demonstrated that his poetic metaphors were just that, poetry. Yet unlike poetry collections, science books just don’t sell as well if the metaphors they use suggest nothing real. So its understandable that Csikszentmihalyi was hardly quick to cast doubt on the vague realities implied by his metaphors, or in other words, providing an explanation for flow.

Ultimately, an explanation of flow would either eliminate its metaphors, or confirm and multiply the processes they imply, with a unique neurological correlate for each turn of phrase. So the original flow ‘theory’, if converted to neural realism becomes either nonsense because it terminology is demonstrated to be empty, or it makes no sense by referring to an intractable interaction of multiple and complex brain states. Luckily, attention comes to the rescue, because attention at root is literally not an unfeeling thing.

Attention, like emotion, thinking, and other psychological processes does not reflect a single neural entity but is rather a taxonomy or classification for many different and very rudimentary neural processes. For attention, these processes attenuate and enhance information that has significance to an individual. Sometimes this information is brought to consciousness, sometimes not, and sometimes the act of selecting information actually feels good. As we will note in a later chapter and in much greater detail, in contrast to the act of sustaining attention (as in meditation), the processes that involve the shifting of attention are enabled by certain neuro-chemicals or neuro-modulators that allow one to fix attention, process and retain information more effectively, and assign a appetitive value or valence ‘tag’ to the information that is selected. In other words, cognitive shifting between different classes of informative stimuli, or cognitive precepts is modulated by neurochemical events that often ‘feel good’. Moreover, the production of neuro-modulator scales or increases with the perceived importance or salience of perceptual events. Thus, one becomes a lot more alert when a police car is one’s rear view mirror than a mini-van. In particular, in circumstances wherein one must rapidly shift attention between multiple salient precepts, neuromodulator production is accentuated and sustained, and is often reported as a euphoric or ecstatic state. Rock climbers, surgeons, creative writers, etc. all engage in activities that require the rapid shifting of attention between multiple salient precepts, and not surprisingly, all commonly report such euphoric or flow states.

Hypnotic, meditative, and flow experiences are all based on assumed or inferred processes, yet the question about the nature of those processes is usually held in abeyance since those questions would presumably not increase the predictive power of the ‘explanations’ that are usually offered for them. Thus suggestion and focused attention elicit unique ‘states’ that result in remarkable experiences or behaviors. No prediction can be simpler or more economical. And indeed, to learn how to elicit hypnotic, meditative, or flow states, no more precise predictions are even necessary. But whereas the predictive powers of hypnotic, meditative, and flow procedures seem simple enough, their explanations can become quite complex affairs, since there is no logical mechanism in place to cull the metaphorical processes that can be piled on that describe them. Thus popular and journalistic treatments of hypnosis, meditation, and flow add metaphor after metaphor until the concepts become top heavy with a score of inferred processes that on faith the audience is asked to believe. But of course, even faith has its problems.

In the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, a vain Emperor, tiring of his normal attire, commands his tailors to weave him a wardrobe of the finest and most rare fabric. His tailors, despairing of finding something entirely new, finally presented him with a wardrobe of the most sheer and subtle fabric. His new clothes were of featherweight, and although transparent to regal eyes, he was assured that his attire would be breathtaking to his subjects, to say the least.

And so the Emperor strolled through the city streets, and nodded pleasantly to his amazed subjects, who complimented him on the splendor of his kingly robes. Although the crowd couldn’t quite see anything, they took the Emperor’s word for it that his clothes were fit for a king. The emperor’s triumphal procession through town continued until a child in the audience looked on in amusement at the naked king, and cried out in laughter, ‘the emperor has no clothes!’

Weaving a theory out of the complex fabric of inferred processes is to leave the facts they embrace as naked as our vainglorious Emperor. The fact that audiences are taken with the existence of the transparent processes that comprise hypnotic, meditative, and flow states demonstrates how one’s critical faculties can be muted in the face of authority, in spite of naked flaws that could be spotted by a child.

The postulation of hypnotic, meditative, and flow states, as well as countless other inferred mental processes defer a detailed accounting of those processes by encapsulating them in an easily digested cipher. And the cipher, like the Emperor’s new clothes, must be taken on faith. Ironically, this makes predictions come easier, since the accuracy of a prediction cannot be questioned or qualified by a knowledge of the fine grain elements of what that prediction entails. Thus, without unnecessary and troublesome qualifications, it is easy to claim that hypnosis can lead one to break bad habits or do outlandish acts or that attention cures disease and increases intelligence. Because the expected outcomes of the hypnotic, meditative, of flow procedures are not constrained by knowledge of the true limitations of our minds, it allows one to easily vault the scope of their outcomes past anything their eliciting procedures can possibly do. In other words, if predictions are easy to come by and resist validation, then they can evolve to absurd lengths to almost literally place you on other worlds. Ironically, this means that although predictions come easy, their explanations become complex and confounded. Thus, if hypnosis, flow, or meditation predict myriad results, then explaining those results must be accounted for by inferred processes of staggering complexity.

In the fairy tale, the Emperor’s tailors predicted that the Emperor’s new clothes would wear well, and were of fine and beautiful design. It doesn’t stretch the imagination that they could have also been warranted to be stain resistant, colorfast, and wrinkle free. Similarly, the predicted qualities of inferred processes are hindered only by the imagination, thus making for easy and profuse predictions that render explanation near impossible.

Whereas neurally ungrounded procedures entail easy, broad and unqualified predictions and complex explanations, procedures that derive from neurally realistic theories entail difficult, narrow, and highly qualified predictions, but ironically result in much simpler explanations. Thus, if the procedures that elicit flow, meditative or hypnotic states entail predictions that are highly qualified and constrained, then it is far less likely that those states reflect unique neural processes.

Unfortunately, easy predictions and complex explanations appeal to both layman and academic alike, since it is understandably very attractive to presume that suggestion can lead us to perform extraordinary things, or that attention can elicit near paranormal states. Moreover, the complex explanations that are entailed enhance the general perception of a psychologist’s unique and hard won expertise. In addition, it provides necessary academic filler for journal articles that interminably reshuffle inferred processes in a never-ending quest for the ‘truth’.

The primacy of explanation over prediction is a basic tenet of the physical and biological sciences, as it must be for the social sciences. Yet explanation requires a reversal of the ways psychologists normally think and theorize about behavior. To wit, mental processes and the neural mechanisms that underlie them cannot be force fitted to match our assumptions, but rather, our assumptions must match the reality of how our brains actually work. This new manner of thinking requires that abstract thought is interpreted as metaphorical, not literal, and that up to date findings about how the human brain works be understood. These findings underscore a contemporary perspective that attributes behavior to the concerted activity of multiple neural processes that act in parallel. The abandonment of literal interpretations of mental causes is critical because it eliminates the reductionist bias that privileges an understanding of behavior to a single data language. In other words, behavior is not just nerves or just feelings or just the behavior of atoms, but is all of these things, and any explanation of behavior must be informed by all of these things. Reality is like a series of Chinese boxes, with the removal of each box progressively revealing a different albeit smaller box that maps to the same contour of events. Now multiple perspectives of reality can confound each other if prediction is what you are looking for, as a chemical formula that includes two parts oxygen, one part hydrogen, and one part ‘wetness’ confuses levels of perspective, and impedes or destroys the predictive power of the equation. On the other hand, multiple perspectives can correct each other if explanation is one’s goal, with the result that operative and purely metaphorical terms are clearly distinguished. This reduces confusion, since if we know for example whether or not a cause such as a ‘case of nerves’ refers to actual nerves, we are able to more accurately estimate and reduce the true causal factors behind behavior.

The number of interlocking perspectives ranges from microscopic activity to the macroscopic, and each engage separate and unique data languages and methodologies as well as appeal to specialized academic audiences that have mastered those languages and methods. Thus the language and methods of biochemistry are distinctly different from physics or neuro-psychology. Remarkably enough, all of these perspectives engage human concerns, and with the incorporation of each level, provide progressively deeper explanations for the perennial questions of existence. The origins of the universe and all existence, the limits of computability, the nature of consciousness, and the biological and environmental determinants of motivation all require deep explanations that involve the integration of multiple levels of analysis, from the macro to the micro. In particular, to understand human motivation, one’s understanding must range from neuronal activity to the conscious events or qualia that emerge from that activity. But to understand mankind and his relationship to the universe, one must integrate all levels, from the physics of elementary particles to the emergent properties of consciousness.

Finally, the use of different levels of analysis not only implicates different nomenclature and different methodology, but also broadens implicit restrictions as to how causal events can be conceived. For common sense and common psychology, behavior occurs due to a conscious appraisal of response options that are generally unimpeded by bodily events. This computational model of the mind implies that behavior occurs due to the conscious and disembodied consideration of informative events that occur in a linear or serial order. As in keeping with the mind as computer metaphor, disembodied mentalistic causes or faculties are readily hypothesized as obscure subroutines that intervene in the mental computation. Thus, if behavior cannot be understood as a natural derivative of reason, it certainly can be understood if obscure mental sub-processes like creativity, virtue, will, courage, etc. are added into the equation. However, if the level of analysis moves downward to include neuropsychology, the monolithic ‘faculties’ that guide behavior are shattered into a multitude of separate yet complexly interactive neural processes. These processes cannot be revealed through conscious introspection, and further act for the most part without the guidance of conscious awareness. These processes are activated in parallel and are controlled by neural and somato-sensory input from brain and body that engages information of past (memory) and present events, bodily feedback (e.g. muscular tension, hormonal activity), neurochemical activity, as well as genetically endowed sensitivities to certain classes of stimuli. In addition, many of these processes bestow appetitive value to behavior, and at times can be felt or interpreted as painful or pleasurable. In other words, behavior is strongly predicated upon the activity of non-conscious mental processes that are mediated by embodied events.

Transferred somewhat imperfectly to their common sense equivalent, these causes simply refer to the concurrent influences of instinct, reason (information), and emotion. However, the popular connotations of these concepts do not quite match their scientific counterpart. This is because the use of any of these concepts often connotes an entire sequence of behaviors rather than an aspect of behavior. When we say that we are behaving emotionally, rationally, or by instinct, we generally implicate an entire pattern of activity that includes all of the causal factors for behavior. For example, one may say that one dates members of the opposite sex because of a sexual instinct, or behaves romantically on a date because of emotional involvement, or asks for another date because it is the reasonable thing to do. In this context, instinct, emotion, and reason become bywords for extended patterns of behavior that obviously engage all three.

To rid these terms of their usual and confounding connotations, their meaning must be made more specific, or they must be replaced with new terms that have specific meanings. Naturally, since common sense can hardly be moved, no matter how long a lever you may have, it is perhaps more proper to look for more specific terms. Luckily, many psychologists of a scientific bent have visited this issue, with instinct, emotion, and reason transformed into the respective concepts of nativism, activation, and learning. Unlike their common sense counterparts, each of these terms reflect the fine grain or ‘molecular’ aspects of information and physiology that underlie the moment to moment transition from one response or response set to another. As the processes of disease can be reduced to separate frame rates that can track the molecular progress of a disease in time, or freeze in time any moment of that progress, the neural processes that underlie behavior can also be bisected into frames and animated at will. But like a director who edits a film through a meticulous attention to the details of each frame, but prepares it for an audience that notes and speaks about only the emergent properties of the final product, so too must a psychologist approach his science. For as with a good movie, the fine details of life are inextricably wedded to the final moving picture we see and feel. In the last twenty years, the mapping of these details to behavior has made great strides, with the molecular correlates of nativistic, activating, and learning variables all being progressively mapped to behavior. However, the integration of these three variables is only in its infancy, with the result that these molecular events are segmented into three subject matters that separately focus on nativistic, activating, or learning variables. These subject matters are respectively enfolded under the sub-disciplines of evolutionary psychology, neuro-psychology, and learning theory.

The world that we perceive seems to be an arbitrary and fixed thing. We all perceive the same colors, the same shapes, and the same concept of time. We all have the same tendencies to favor sweet or salty foods, to respond sexually to the same outlines of the opposite sex, to know the meaning of a smile or the pangs of love. We attend, perceive, and think in similar ways, and in essence we are all cut out of the same evolutionary cloth. This is a natural and unremarkable finding since the selectionist pressures required to adapt to the historical vicissitudes of life have made us supremely adapted as thinking beings to a world that molds our mentality with unending challenge. Morphology is destiny, and the daily pressures of existence multiplied over the eons have selected for the physiological structures that define our humanity and impel us through the most ordinary behavior to insure our genetic immortality.

We have innate or nativistic tendencies to perceive information in certain ways, to act in certain ways, and to think in certain ways. The neural structures that provide these sensitivities are incredibly subtle, and engage molecular neural processes that are near invisible. Our primary drives are dependent upon small clusters of cells, and even smaller intracellular neurochemical processes that activate those clusters to strikingly different effect. For example, the hypothalamus is a mid brain organelle the size of a match head that lies deep in our midbrain. But feelings of hunger, thirst, or sexual arousal are mediated by the hypothalamus through activating neuro-chemical agents that in turn are stimulated and inhibited by complex neural processes that embody patterns of neural activity as labyrinthine as a spider web. But many other sensitivities cannot be so easily reduced to clusters of cells or neurochemical activity, hence are validated by inferring patterns of selection that span millennia, and by ethnological studies that establish universal human traits across cultures. In other words, nativistic processes are inferred through the appraisal of indirect evidence rather than derived from a solid grounding to actual neural events. For example, an aversion to incest is a cultural universal, and seems to occur regardless of the presence or lack thereof of cultural proscriptions against the practice. Similarly, male aggressiveness and promiscuity, maternal behavior, and selfless human cooperation all have a universal presence within cultures. Because these traits seem to occur independently of informative or learning variables as mediated by culture, and because plausible selection histories can be deduced to account for those traits, then behavior can be reliably predicted through a mere accounting of these sensitivities. For example, a genetic sensitivity to sweet tasting substances allows one to predict a subsequent liking for candy bars, pies, and ice cream, and the behavior required to attain them. Thus to predict how a child will behave, a knowledge of these genetic sensitivities will allow you to reliably predict the behavioral traits they will engender. Similarly, the fact that human males are more attracted to visual aspects of the female form and all the varieties thereof allows one to predict subsequent male promiscuity, interest in visual pornography, and the behaviors from courtship to rape that enable a man to sexually attain them. Human behavior, from the simple (orientation to a sweet taste or to a passing female) to the complex (running after the ice cream truck or for that matter, a female) is thus easily predictable and practically attributable to the influence of genetic sensitivities.

To an evolutionary psychologist, to know one’s instinctive or nativistic sensitivities is to know what one primarily needs to know in order to predict behavior. However, to a neuro-psychologist, nativistic causes are secondary to neural activating processes that nonconsciously direct behavior. The subject matter of neuro-psychology is the intra-cellular neural processes that enable one to perceive, attend, learn, and make rudimentary decisions. These processes reflect the localized and modular functions that are provided by organelles that make up the human brain, from the brain stem and neo cortex to the minute cellular assemblies that make up the mid brain. The processes may also represent the supervening activity of feed-forward and feed-backward interconnections between these local functions. The resulting model of the brain is thus rendered as a massively parallel computer that engages the exquisitely timed activity of multiple and concurrently acting processes.

In a neuro-psychological perspective, behavior is enabled primarily through neural activity, but the qualitative aspects of behavior are selected because of activating neurochemical, hormonal, and somatic inputs that provide a valence ‘tag’ that marks the value of individual choices. These qualitative attributes of behavior may be reflected in purely objective terms, such as rate, intensity, or physical form, and/or they may be reflected in purely subjective terms, such as the different shadings and forms of pleasure and pain. Finally, these attributes are for the most part non-consciously perceived, and do not surface in conscious awareness. Subjectively, we attribute the influence of nonconscious activating variables to intuition, gut feelings, or just ‘instinct’. Objectively, these inputs considered in total and mapped to language are called emotion.

As a massively parallel biological computer, the ‘power source’ that directs the most subtle and critical choices is not on/off bursts of electrons that are mapped to a serial chain of formal language like symbols, as in a computer, but in the remarkably diffuse and focused activating events from muscular tension to neurochemical activity that nonconsciously direct and embody our attention and awareness, and generally act independently of a formal symbolic language. Activating events empower behavior through supporting levels of alertness that enable the effective processing of information, and provide valence tagging by bestowing an appetitive value to behavior. More precisely, activating effects are critical to the molecular decision making that enables us to shift attention to the fine grain aspects of experience, whether it be an creative thought, the smell of a hot dog, or the site of a trailing police car. Activating effects, as broadly subsumed under the concept of emotion, bind all the information that is of value to an individual, and as the core of those events we find ‘reinforcing’ or rewarding, instigate and sustain choice.

Thus, to understand why we persist in moving towards goals that are deferred far into the future, the roots of empathy, creativity, extraversion, mania, sociopathy, or reasons behind many of the choices that confound our own reasonable expectations of what our behavior should be, we must understand the activating events that comprise emotion.

Whereas instinct and emotion can be used to predict behavior, it may be argued that information is the most basic and reliable determinant of behavior. The information that is encoded in our daily experiences is stored in memory, and yet even the simplest memories pervade the brain, and are stored globally. We process information that is stored in the labyrinthine skein of neural connections that unlike the activating events in emotion cannot be mapped by any conceivable instrumentation. So in lieu of tracing the actual neural processes that reflect our experiences and memories, learning theories map behavior to the abstract temporal and physical patterns of events we daily and historically perceive. It starts with the simple correlations that are the stuff of experience. Whether the correlations are modeled abstractly (B follows A), perceptually (dawn proceeds the day), or behaviorally (the door opens when I turn the key), behavior occurs or is selected because of the cumulative import of correlative and/or contingent relationships between stimulus and response. The prediction and control of behavior is therefore a matter of arranging the contingencies of reinforcement just so, a procedural tactic that merely formalizes the procedures or reward and punishment that we find in the common sense procedures for behavioral control that are used in social environments from education to business.

Learning theories use overt behavior as their dependent measure, and the resulting behavioristic perspective is unabashedly predictive in nature. As such, it eschews theoretical constructs that attempt to explain behavior through the use of inferred processes, as it holds that inferred processes don’t provide explanations in the first place. But this is a moot point, since explanation is not the historical concern of behavioristic approaches. So rather than adopting the mere pretense of explanation through the postulation of inferred processes, behaviorism separately argues against the need for explanation. Thus, concepts such as reinforcement, sensitization, and punishment are defined as procedures that effect behavioral outcomes, and not as processes that represent obscurely defined mental processes or as events that need further description of the underlying neural processes that supplement or refine the predictive power of those procedures.

Neuro, behavioristic, and evolutionary psychology represent a thoroughgoing molecular viewpoint that respectively emphasize the determination of the actual neural processes that underlie behavior and the short and long scale cumulative selection histories that instigate such processes. These selection histories may cross personal or geologic time, as is reflected in the respective subject matters of behavioristic and evolutionary psychology. In the case of evolutionary psychology, selection histories are generally inferred, whereas behavioristic methodology makes these histories explicit by allowing behavior to be reproduced or ‘recovered’ through the experimental duplication of selection or reinforcement histories. In other words, whereas in evolutionary psychology the behavior traits are invariant and have historical causes that are inferred, in behaviorism such causes are traceable by and amenable to experimental intervention. Thus, while an evolutionary psychologist may attribute human aggressiveness to a genetic cause that can only be moderated through a eon-spanning process of natural selection that can only be hypothetically validated, a behavioristic psychologist may attribute the same trait to a personal learning history that can be both validated and changed by modifying the contingencies of reinforcement that control an individual’s behavior.

The perspectives of learning theory and evolutionary psychology adhere to a commitment to respectively isolating the fine grain aspects of experience and heredity. In addition, both complement the molecular commitments of a neuropsychological perspective. However, generally none of these positions inform each other. This is evidenced in the scant cross-referencing in popular and journalistic articles to sources that hold these perspectives. Thus, popular books on evolutionary psychology scarcely address learning concepts, and books on learning generally ignore genetic determinants of behavior. Complicating this picture even further is a general disregard of the neuro-psychological concomitants of hereditable tendencies or learning processes. The resulting lack of integration between evolutionary, behavioristic and neuro-psychology results in interminable arguments over the respective weightings of genetic and environmental causes, since the integrative explanations that would more precisely determine the molecular parameters of these causes are wanting. Of course, the lack of a comprehensive explanation does not impact the predictive power of these subject matters, since any behavior can in principle be generally predicted through a recourse to genetic, learning, or neurological factors. However, thoroughgoing explanations are nonetheless wanting, with the result that the predictions of genetic and learning accounts of behavior generally overreach or mismatch the predictions that would be entailed if suitable explanations were at hand.

In keeping with our earlier observation of the advantages and disadvantages of predictive versus explanatory schemes, it is notable that evolutionary psychology as a predictive science is pretty simple. Fight with your boss, lust after your secretary, and eat burgers all day, and there is most surely some genetic disposition that has a heavy hand in it. Likewise, for a learning theorist, the same behavior is just as easily predicted through a simple recourse to patterns of reward and punishment that provide a calculus of costs and benefits resulting in individual choice. A neuro-psychologist would add to the confusion by tracking the activating somatic and neural events that nonconsciously give direction to behavior, and obviate even the most reasoned or instinctive choices.

Rather than being integrated with one another, these points of view are instead generally pitted against one another as adversarial positions. Because their theoretical commitments are to schools of thought that value predictions over explanations, ‘nature-nurture’ becomes a by word for competing predictive schemes rather than integrative solutions that require a much broader understanding of alternative points of view. This is particularly evident in the common attribution of genetic or informative causes to idiosyncratic patterns of behavior that resist easy explanation. Take for example incest taboos, gambling, and altruistic behavior. All denote responses that have different normative implications (incest is bad, virtue is good), are common across all cultures, and are not explainable through the cost/benefit language of common sense. However, in lieu of explanations that engage the subject matters and methodologies of all varieties of molecular psychology, including of course the neurological facts that underpin them, explanations for these types of behavior are routinely adduced to genetic or informational causes that go beyond what these causes can confidently predict. But as we will now demonstrate, true explanations that integrate the disparate findings of molecular psychology rein in the individual predictive power of evolutionary or learning causes, and thus provide simpler and more powerful explanations for psychological phenomena.

Tradition has always extolled the charms of the girl next door. They are the one’s we seek out, marry, and have families with. However, familiarity may not only breed attraction, it may also breed indifference. But can the simplest facts of experience moderate the sexual impulses that figure so highly in our behavior, and make us resist even the allure of a pretty girl next door? At first glance, it would seem not. Besides the authority of folklore, the availability of a willing partner down the street would seem to easily activate the genetically rooted impulses that, to say the least, would result in a little scandal and a lot of babies. Oddly, the opposite may just as likely come to pass; particularly if one’s prospective sexual partner was raised as a close friend, or was treated, well, like family.

And of course that brings us to family. We all know that the most unpalatable sexual partner one may have is a close kin. Evolutionary biologists have not unsurprisingly noted a universal aversion to the practice of incest, and have been quick to postulate a genetic origin, since after all sex with your closest kin would not generally result in ‘fit’ offspring. But aversion for close kin also occurs for non-familial relationships that promote close kin-ship. Children raised in close proximity in the Israeli kibbutz as well as adults paired in other environments from college dormitories to military formations have markedly less propensity to intermarry, and this aversion seems to occur in any social setting that consistently places individuals over time in a non-sexual social environment.

The universality of an aversion to incest crosses genetic boundaries to implicate the social and environmental structures that set the contexts wherein behavior can or cannot occur. The influence of historical context over behavior is otherwise known as ‘stimulus control’, or in common language as ‘habit’. Stimulus control reflects the subtle patterns of informative events that allow one to discriminate between optional choices. But it also signals the preparatory or priming responses that set the occasion for behavior and in turn signal subsequent behavior. For example, the sight of food, a pretty girl, or an onrushing car signal respective responses such as salivation, sexual arousal, or ‘flight or fight’ responses that prime an individual to eat, make a pass, or run away. Generally, individuals are ‘primed’ to want to eat, have sex, do homework, or other activities dependent upon informational cues that are generally nonconsciously perceived. And if those informational cues don’t exist or predict contrary behavior, cue based behavior will be less likely to occur. So, we are uncomfortable sitting elsewhere than on our favorite chair, eating breakfast food for dinner, or in the case of the girl next door, having sex if the predictive cues that prime us for such activities are missing. In the case of incest, the universality of the incest taboo seems to point to a genetic cause only because conscious and nonconscious informative factors have been incidentally rather than fully considered. Since all sibling relationships start out in distinctly unisexual contexts, a mapping of these contexts can quite easily account for an aversion to incest as well as to variants of sexual aversion that obviously have no genetic root.

In learning theory, behavior is not only due to a conscious consideration of response choices, but is also nonconsciously signaled through recourse to historical patterns of responding that characterizes learning histories. These histories are quite subtle, and can only be reliably discerned through methodologies that can clearly establish and replicate those histories. These methodologies entail a contingency-based data language that is the lingua franca of learning theories that use the measurement of behavioral patterns as their primary subject matter. These behavioristic approaches are of course absent in the confident pronouncements of evolutionary psychologists who are too quick to postulate nonconscious reflexive behavior in lieu of considering the alternative of nonconscious information processing. The attribution of genetic causes for incest aversion is an example of this, yet remains controversial since a general knowledge of learning theory among evolutionary psychologists remains wanting.

But the worm of course does turn, as learning theorists in turn are blissfully unaware of the neurological events that underlie learning histories and the innumerable choices they encompass, and that alter behavior in noticeable but unnoted ways.

It’s a slight of hand, an illusion pulled over otherwise thoughtful minds. Or even simpler, it is merely a schedule of reward that is variable or uncertain, and makes seemingly worthwhile each hopeful turn of the roulette wheel. That’s the common take on it, and the fact that as individuals we are pretty awful in estimating risk speaks poorly of those gambling interests who would take advantage of our inability to figure the odds. Predicting gambling behavior and the performance rate that we will display while gambling is merely a matter of making uncertain or variable the payoff of each roll of the die. So to predict a predilection for gambling and to keep us focused on gambling, you look to the contingencies of reward that support it. Thus, prediction is simple, and requires nothing more than a design of response contingencies that keep us rooted to the task at hand, like mice pressing bars for the odd M&M.

Whether formalized as response contingencies, or rendered informal by adjustments of slot machine payoffs or the betting rules of the house, the prediction of gambling behavior merely follows the gambler’s estimate of the contingencies of reward that are implicit in games of chance. Of course, this mechanical view of gambling invites criticism, since sleight of hand, even if the bettor is on to the trick, is as morally disreputable as any con game. Yet as an explanation such interpretations are wanting, since they fail to account for neurological events that are superfluous to prediction, yet account as strongly for gambling’s allure.

Of course, as any gambler would tell you, gambling is more than the emission of high rates of lever pressing due to the perception of variable patterns of information. It is enjoyable, exciting, and for those who cannot resist its pleasures, addicting. In other words, the lure of gambling has something to do with the performance itself, and is not just information. But if gambling is information and something more, how does this mysterious something alter the widely held metaphor of the human brain as a close analogue to the computing devices that populate our world?

Inherent in information is the fact that it is meaningless unless it is processed. For electro-mechanical computing, the computing substratum that channels or processes information does not interfere with the information itself. Thus no additional instructions are added to a spreadsheet or data base program by the microprocessor itself, or on a lower level by the electrons that are gated and channeled by that program. Of course, the human brain does not work that way, as the substratum that processes information does indeed change or modulate the information that is mapped to the complex interconnections of neurons in the brain. The major question is how pervasive and subtle this modulation can be. We know that strong emotions and biological dispositions can color our perceptions. Thus the otherwise logical procession of thoughts and motives is disrupted and changed by pangs of hunger or thirst, or by emotional reactions such as anger or anxiety. These events are easily viewed as intermittent and additive, but not as a constant modulator of thinking processes. The resulting movement of emotional events to the ‘margins’ thus allows purely informative explanations to represent complete explanations, since the neural passageways that map to informative contingencies do not in general compromise the predictive power of that information when considered alone.

However, this position is no longer tenable. The individual molecular events that comprise individual choice involve the shifting of attention to cognitive precepts that involve aspects of the environment that we inwardly perceive through thought. All of these require attention to be momentarily ‘fixed’ through the presence of a neuro-chemicals or ‘neuro-modulators’ that signify or mark the importance or valence of these precepts. In addition, these markers change the physical substratum that processes information by changing the synaptic efficiency of individual neurons. In other words, to maintain attention, attract attention, and think efficiently, the very dynamics of the act of thinking itself provide this by bestowing an appetitive value on behavior, and thus change behavior. In particular, when attention must shift between a series of salient cognitive precepts, a lot a neuromodulator is produced, thus optimally fixing and maximizing attention, and accentuating its importance both nonconsciously and by conscious feelings of pleasure. In other words, structural characteristics of a task, and not just the task itself add value to behavior. That is, it is not just what we think that changes value, but how we think.

If we consider gambling behavior, we can easily see how the allure of gambling is not in the behavior itself, which is pretty redundant and quite simple, but rather in terms of how the behavior is structured. Take a stroll through a gambling casino, and one is struck with behavioral patterns that are not much different from the piecework routines of textile or other production line workers. The endless repetition of pulling levers, pushing buttons, and spinning wheels is the stuff of sweatshops everywhere, and in spite of the addition of many more colors, blinking lights, and free alcohol, a casino would be just as much a drudge if every pull on a slot machine provided results that were always foreknown. What makes gambling pleasurable and addictive is merely a consideration of the infinite possibilities, the many choices and their branching outcomes that can represent gilded fortunes and futures.

The variable response contingencies that are typical of gambling, as well as other sports and games represent merely a perceptual structure that accelerates an aspect of neural activity, namely perceptual set shifting, that intrinsically contains an appetitive or affective component. The fact that the act of thinking itself can be literally intoxicating is provocative, and as we will later see is critical to theories of reward or reinforcement. But for the moment, we must appreciate the fact that although mapping behavior to information patterns or reinforcement contingencies can in general predict gambling behavior, that prediction can only partially account for the facts of behavior because the neural correlates of the behavior are not described. In other words, the behavior is not fully explained. Thus although an analysis of reinforcement contingencies can map to and be used to predict the overt behavior of gambling, it cannot account for and thus cannot predict the covert feelings of pleasure, interest, and alertness that those contingencies also produce. A prediction of overt behavior cannot account for the covert responses that have value to us, and by not occurring in tandem with a satisfactory explanation of behavior, does not predict behavior, but merely a narrow subset of behavior (response rate). Thus the ability to predict a response rate, no matter how inerrant, does not permit you to determine the intrinsic value of that behavior because the affective events that are critical to that value are not considered. By disregarding the importance of complete explanations, predictions of behavior invariably cannot incorporate many critical aspects of behavior. This results in philosophical and practical conclusions that are far removed from the actual reality of the behavior itself. Thus, gambling is often derided as a mere disreputable con game when in effect it provides a multitude of intrinsic benefits, win or lose.

It should be noted that this limitation mirrors an oft-repeated criticism of learning theory as a superficial approach to understanding behavior since it does not account for intrinsically motivated states. However, intrinsically motivated states are commonly postulated as inferred mental processes that are just as un-rooted to actual neurological events as the learning principles they aim to supplant, thus effectively exchanging one non-explanation for another.

Finally, the astute reader will note the similarities of gambling behavior with the flow response. Both gambling and flow share perceptual environments that demand rapid perceptual set shifting between multiple salient precepts, but flow is distinguished not by the emotional roller coaster of ‘thrilling’ experiences, such as gambling, sporting, or other events, but rather by a calmer setting for ecstasy that is unassociated with other somatic responses that are characteristic of anxiety, fear, or tension. In other words, the neurological processes that regulate attention and underlie the ‘feel’ of attentiveness are not incompatible with other somatic events that are likewise signaled by the situation. Like a social drinker associating the painful jolt of a shot of bourbon with the resulting alcoholic ‘buzz’, pain and pleasure can coexist and be even confused. Similarly, the neurological concomitants to attentional shifting can occur in tandem with a multitude of other pleasurable and painful events, and result in a conversion of otherwise aversive or noxious events into something downright attractive. The fact that individuals can eagerly anticipate the pleasurable aspects of dangerous and painful situations, as exemplified in ‘extreme’ sports or other challenging tasks, demonstrates the highly reinforcing nature of the simple act of paying attention.

Common sense tells us that behavior is set in motion by future goals, and is pulled along as if by psychic gravity to attain those objects that maximize one’s well being, or if an evolutionary metaphor is introduced, one’s genetic fittedness. Thus we complete a homework assignment to get a good grade, write a book to see it published, and court a girl to be wed (or to be bedded). The realistic anticipation of a tangible outcome of behavior makes behavior easily describable and for the most part predictable. However, many other behaviors occur when their motivating outcomes are scarcely tangible, near unattainable, or result in ends that replace realistic with idealistic goals. This causes something of a problem, since if behavior occurs that is either absent of or precludes a substantive purpose; we are left with purposes and processes that are in substance inferred.

Of course, faculty psychology is up to the challenge, and any number of inferred mental processes, from needs for achievement, affiliation, power and so forth can be called to take up the explanatory slack. Explanations from learning theory and evolutionary psychology are thankfully more parsimonious but no less obscure. Thus self ‘less’ behavior can be chalked up to simple yet obscurely defined learning histories or genetic causes. Of course, the end result remains that the behavior’s causes are still ill defined. Yet, if someone’s behavior is of significant value to us, then we can aim to insure its continued availability at least by our collective favor.

The artists and musicians who write or compose with scant encouragement or remuneration, the sages and saints who selflessly give to others, and the unsung millions who are devoted to wives, families, friends, and country are exemplars of those who display human virtue. In contrast to disreputable behavior that in general can always be attributed to obvious or ulterior motives, human virtue often is remarkable because it is not just selfless but motiveless. If motivation could only be denoted in terms of behavioral relationships to tangible outcomes, this would be undeniably true, but if motivation can be virtual, then the benefits of altruism make a saint’s behavior as calculated as a thief’s.

When you think about it, we spent the vast majority of our time not acquiring things, but waiting around for things. Whether it is a summer vacation, a ride on a Ferris wheel, or the end of a hard days work, what keeps us going to the bitter or better end is the realization of the imminent possibilities. Of course, imminent possibilities invariably become realities, and behavior can be pegged to events that actually occur, even if we have to wait years before we obtain them.

In contrast, good, creative, or other wise remarkable acts are not guided by tangible events that generally result from behavior, but represent outcomes that are virtually implied through behavior. In other words, when we become aware that we are doing something bold, creative, or caring, we are aware of the likely reactions of other people as if they were aware of our accomplishment. Indeed, this awareness is often enough to inspire us to continue with behavior that may never entail an actual response from another. Thus, we die for our countries, labor on works of art or literature that will never be viewed or read, and perform selfless deeds because we can model what idealized or virtual audiences may think.

Virtual rewarding or reinforcing events are necessary to keep us directed to distant goals, to think about strategies to reach those goals, and to do so for the most part nonconsciously. Non-verbally may be a better approximation of the latter term, since our distant ancestors didn’t have the luxury of language to describe the tangible rewards just around the corner. But our ancestors, as well as their mammalian kin, did have emotion, and the activating and felt presence’s of neurochemical and somatic events kept them on the straight and narrow. Like the periodic punishing scold or rewarding cookie that keeps a child rooted to a behavior that in the end is good for her, the virtual modeling of as-if possibilities and their emotional concomitants moves the future to the present, and the imagination of what can be provides the ongoing motive to continue towards the events that will be.

When virtual rewards do not lead to or lead away from tangible rewards, the decision to pursue the former creates a dissonance with the common sense models of behavior that give preference to real results. A soldier who gives his life for his country gives up a tangible reward (returning home to family and friends) for an intangible one (the virtual favor of his countrymen). Similarly, a generous or altruistic individual gives a sizeable donation to a charity in spite of the fact that he will never see or be directly acknowledged by the subjects of his largess. In the large, virtue is the grand gesture that makes for drama, medals, sainthood, or national commemoration. But it is the smallest gestures that are far more common, and no less remarkable. The etiquette of daily life means to consistently defer one’s best interests in the service of others. Whether it is opening a door for another, being polite to others, or not stealing a hotel’s towels, we continually refrain from the sociopathic self-aggrandizement that may logically serve one’s genes, but little else.

The difficulty in fitting virtuous behavior to common sense models of behavior that identify self interest with real interests ultimately forces a reconsideration of how we normally conceive of motivation. The alternative would be to retain the flawed common sense interpretation of thought, and like the Ptolemaic geocentric theory of the solar system, to artificially brace it with the introduction of an ever widening number of inferred processes (needs, drives, and genetically rooted impulses) to account for it all. The latter route has been the historical path for most psychologists who confuse ‘explanations’ with the mere act of deferring explanation, and as we have previously noted is a scientific dead end.

A new motivational model can account for the logic in our seeming illogic by weaving the separate strands of evolutionary, learning, and neuro-psychological theory, and derives the simple virtues that make life worthwhile from the simple structures that enable us to think. As we will next explore, the enhanced ability to model the possibilities expands the ability to be reinforced. That allows one to navigate the world, keeps one on course towards distant goals, and at times, conflates our realistic interest with virtual interest. But this new model requires not a unity of our knowledge, which is the easy part, but a unity of our virtual with our real motives. And the latter is something many of would die for rather than change.

(to be continued…)

May 28, 2001