The Case for Trialism
Martin Bryan
What is Trialism?
Two popular concepts of the way the mind works have been given labelled Monism and Dualism
because they view the mind and the body as either being a single thing or a dual thing. Neither of
these theories fits my view of how my body and mind work. In this paper I propose a three-fold
division of the body, based on senses, memory and pattern recognition that I have labelled Trialism.
Why do I reject Monism?
Monism is a label that is applied to the materialist approach to the role of the brain in the body. A
materialist views everything as being made of matter. To a materialist the mind is simply a store for
sensed data from which memories can be reconstructed on demand to generate an internal ‘image’
of what happened in the past.
There are many different sub-forms of materialism, which have been labelled with terms such as
naturalism, scientism, cognitivism, behaviourism, etc. What they seem to have in common is the
belief that mental phenomena are determined in some way by the state of the mind and of its direct
relationship with bodily processes such as the perceptions and movement.
Most materialistic concepts depend on the concept of behaviour which is controlled by bodily needs
and/or mental desires. It is assumed that bodily needs are recorded directly as state changes in the
brain. It is presumed that mental desires are similarly recorded as state changes in the brain. It is
these state changes that are said to control my behaviour, either through unconscious actions of my
body or by conscious actions taken to meet the goal set by my desires.
Why do I find I cannot agree with this concept? In the first case I do no believe that what is stored in
my memory has anything to do with the actual state of my senses at the time the event that
triggered the memory being recorded took place. In the second case I do not believe that what is
stored in my memory has direct control over my body. I am convinced that my memory resides in
what is referred to as my brain. If I try to recall something from my memory my actions seem to take
place in the area of my head I am told contains my brain. Somewhat fortunately I have never seen
my brain. I sincerely hope this will remain the case throughout my life. The only case I have for
believing that I have a brain, other than the feeling I have in my head, is that I remember having
been shown by other people views of what they claim was inside the head of a third person. I have
no reason to disbelieve these ‘facts’ which, like many of the other memories in my brain, have been
derived by an interpretation of an image provided to my senses by a sensor that I know is not part
of my body, in this case a camera that allows images to be captured outside of my range of vision.
There are many facts stored in my memory that are outside the range of my senses. Having read the
November 2008 issue of National Geographic I have an idea in my head of what the surface of Mars
looks like. I know that no human currently alive has been on Mars, and have no reason to believe
that any human has ever been there. I know that some of the images from Mars made visible to me,
through views created in false colours, data in wavelengths that would not be visible to me if I was
to desire to risk my life by going to the planet. I have no reason to disbelieve any of the facts
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presented to me by viewing these images sent from a remote sensor any more than I would
disbelieve something I had seen directly with my own eyes. I do not, obviously, believe that the
moon landings I saw as a youth were a stunt set up in a US studio.
Even the images I see using my own vision are not stored in my memory in the form they are
recorded by my retina. I cannot distinguish what my left eye saw from what my right eye saw, let
alone determine what I saw with my cones and what I saw with my rods. My memories of my
father’s paintings are memories of trees, buildings, geese and people, not of blobs of green, brown,
white or pink paint surrounded by a wooden frame.
There are many other similar examples I can give. I can remember hearing a Richard Strauss waltz
played at a New Year’s Day concert in Vienna, even though I have never been in Vienna on New
Year’s Day. I could not hum you the tune I heard on the radio, or even remember which waltz I
heard in which year, but I clearly remember that there was a waltz by Richard Strauss. From this it is
obvious to me that what remains stored in my memory is not a direct record of what my senses
heard, but a partial record of something the commentator may or may not have said at the time
which I, for some reason, have decided to retain in my memory rather that what I actually heard.
By now you should be convinced that memories are not directly related to senses. But why do I also
not believe that memories control behaviour? I have a terrible memory for tunes. I can never hum
more than a couple of bars of one, even directly after I have heard it. But the funny thing is that I
know as soon as I try to hum the tune that I have got the tune wrong. How can this be true? Before
trying to explain this, let me point out some facts about our memory of tunes that you have perhaps
not considered fully before. When I hear a tune such as a Strauss waltz I hear the sounds of many
different instruments, and many types of instruments. There are the violins, violas, cellos and double
bases in the string section, the piccolos, clarinets and flutes in the woodwinds, the trumpets,
trombones and tubas in the brass section and the drums and cymbals of the percussion section. But
what I try to hum to myself when I recall the tune is not based on the notes played by any single
instrument, but something based on the combined effect that the instruments played in time
together had on my mind. But what I achieve in humming the tune is not what is stored in my
memory. I don’t actually vocalise anything when I hum to myself, but I know I am humming the tune
because I can feel the muscles in my mouth contracting as if I was audibly humming the tune. Yet my
brain interprets these actions as is the tune was audible, compares it with what it remembers and
tells me, immediately, that I have forgotten the tune I have heard. How can my mistake happen if
my memory is in direct control of my body?
Let me consider another example. Having pulled a ligament in a recent fall I am having to undertake
a set of exercises to recover full use of my knee. I learnt of what was required for these exercises
when the doctor in A&E handed me a leaflet saying I should do the exercises explained in the leaflet
until the knee gets better. The leaflet contained a few not very explanatory diagrams, and some text.
Reading this text, and interpreting it in my mind, I discovered what movements I needed to enforce
in my legs to undertake to recover the use of my knee. I have successfully undertaken the exercises,
and my knee has been causing me less pain since I have done them. So I know my mind can control
my body. Why therefore, do I still feel pain if I twist my knee or try to walk upstairs? Why does my
brain, knowing that I will feel pain when I twist my knee or try to walk upstairs, let me do these
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things? Surely, if it were in direct control of my body, it should stop me doing anything that would
cause me pain.
Being a typical grumpy old man I suffer from the usual problem of older people. By the time I have
got upstairs, growling at the pain that I am in, I have forgotten what I have gone up there for. How is
it that something stored in my memory, which led to my desire to go upstairs that led to my action,
has apparently disappeared from my memory during the course of the action? Why does this
memory return the minute I return to the point at which the action was originally triggered? The
context in which the memory triggered the action seems to me, based on my many experiences of it,
to be of some significance to the action.
Why do I reject Dualism?
Dualism is the label applied to the mind/body division that is best known from its explication in the
Meditations of Rene Descartes. Descartes suggests that the mind has different properties from the
body, and is not permanently linked to it. From this premise it can be assumed, for example, that our
soul can go to heaven after our death, or that we can have ‘out-of-body’ experiences because the
intellectual part of our being is not limited by our bodily state. As with monism, there are different
subcategories of dualism, such as property dualism and substance dualism.
Many of Descartes arguments are based around the idea that he originally felt that he could not be
sure he was not dreaming rather than actually sensing something. By the end of Meditation VI,
however, he was convinced that this idea was ridiculous, because he could clearly distinguish
between thoughts that occurred in the dream state from those that occur when not dreaming. John
Veitch’s 1901 translation of Meditation VI ends with this paragraph (my emphasis):
“for, knowing that all my senses more usually indicate to me what is true than what is false, in
matters relating to the advantage of the body, and being able almost always to make use of more
than a single sense in examining the same object, and besides this, being able to use my memory
in connecting present with past knowledge, and my understanding which has already discovered
all the causes of my errors, I ought no longer to fear that falsity may be met with in what is daily
presented to me by the senses. And I ought to reject all the doubts of those bygone days, as
hyperbolical and ridiculous, especially the general uncertainty respecting sleep, which I could not
distinguish from the waking state: for I now find a very marked difference between the two
states, in respect that our memory can never connect our dreams with each other and with the
course of life, in the way it is in the habit of doing with events that occur when we are awake.
And, in truth, if some one, when I am awake, appeared to me all of a sudden and as suddenly
disappeared, as do the images I see in sleep, so that I could not observe either whence he came
or whither he went, I should not without reason esteem it either a specter or phantom formed in
my brain, rather than a real man. But when I perceive objects with regard to which I can distinctly
determine both the place whence they come, and that in which they are, and the time at which
they appear to me, and when, without interruption, I can connect the perception I have of them
with the whole of the other parts of my life, I am perfectly sure that what I thus perceive occurs
while I am awake and not during sleep. And I ought not in the least degree to doubt of the truth
of these presentations, if, after having called together all my senses, my memory, and my
understanding for the purpose of examining them, no deliverance is given by any one of these
faculties which is repugnant to that of any other: for since God is no deceiver, it necessarily
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follows that I am not herein deceived. But because the necessities of action frequently oblige us
to come to a determination before we have had leisure for so careful an examination, it must be
confessed that the life of man is frequently obnoxious to error with respect to individual objects;
and we must, in conclusion, acknowledge the weakness of our nature.”
In this passage Descartes clearly identifies the key role that memory plays in the interpretation of
our senses and identifies the key fact that it is the combination of our senses together with relevant
memories that allows us to “understand” what we sense.
It would seem my brain does not work in the same way as that described by psychologists such as
Freud or philosophers such as Descartes. My dreams do not consist of a series of images, a movie, or
the sounds of celestial music. My dreams consist of imaginary dialogues between myself and,
typically, one other person. OK, I’ve been reading avidly most of my life, and writing on-and-off for
much of it, so I am a word-oriented person. I prefer to read a book and imagine the scenes in my
head in my own way rather than watch a movie. But what gets stored in my memory is a summary of
the words I read, not the scenes I imagined. To me there was always something wrong with
Descartes’ basic hypothesis of having his senses replaced by other signals sent by the Devil. If, as I
postulated above, what is stored in my memory is the summation of my senses based on my
knowledge at the time of perception, how could the Devil get concepts into my memory in a
relevantly processed form? Most people seem only get as far as Meditation II in Descartes’ treatise. I
have rarely come across anyone who has quoted or referred to Descartes’ conclusions, yet these are
what best fits my experience. There is a world of difference between our cognition when we are
dreaming and that which takes place while we are awake.
But this is not the only reason I reject Dualism. I have a much more fundamental objection to the
divorcing of mind from body. It concerns the musicians at my New Year’s Day concert in Vienna. I
have been told that some of these musicians can sight read music, and so can play a piece that they
have never heard before. In fact at the concert I remember there was also the first performance of a
piece of music. I am intrigued by how such a performance can take place if the mind is not directly
connected to the body. When a musician sight reads a musical score and plays the tune on his
instrument he is performing a wide range of actions in real time. When he does this as part of an
orchestra he has to do this taking careful note of what is going on around him if he is not to play a
note at the wrong time. Among other things he has to do I would consider the following as essential:
1. To view the page of the score containing the piece to be played and detect the correct bar
on the score.
2. To determine which timing applies to the bar, and which chord it is written in.
3. To identify which notes need to be played by his instrument during the bar, and the order in
which these notes need to be played.
4. To identify which fingers need to be depressed to play the notes in the required sequence.
5. To identify what his mouth or other hand needs to do to produce the notes selected by his
fingers.
6. To co-ordinate the movement of his finger with the movements of his other body parts.
7. To watch for the movement of the conductor that identifies the start of the bar.
8. To listen to the notes played by the other members of the orchestra to ensure that his notes
are played at appropriate times.
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9. To listen to his own notes to ensure that his instrument is producing the notes it is supposed
to.
I’m afraid that I cannot see how these actions can take place virtually simultaneously without some
direct bi-directional link between the brain and the body. Much of what the musician does is done
by instinct borne of many, many hours of dedicated practice. I have read that at least 10,000 hours
of practice are required to develop the eye-hand co-ordination needed to become a top-class
musician. I can well believe this, knowing just how badly things turn out if I try to play a musical
score.
Why am I convinced Trialism is the way my body works?
I have spent my working life using computers to generate printed words, starting in the late 1960’s
with some of the earliest computer typesetting systems in the UK and progressing on to the very
latest XML-based Microsoft word processing systems developed to capture text in the 21st century.
Perhaps it is inevitable that my proposed model for the human mind should be based on what I have
experienced in computing, but I have more than just experience to base my concepts on. I have the
following facts which my model is able to take into account but which other models do not seem to
allow for:
1. What is stored in my memory is not the direct result of the senses received from my input
devices, such as my eyes, ears and mouth.
2. What is stored in my memory is only part of what I have experienced – only key features are
retained in the memory.
3. What is stored in my memory cannot directly drive my body – some conclusions need to be
drawn before what is stored in my memory can be used to control my body.
What is it about computer systems that convinces me that they are an adequate model for what is in
my mind? Unlike many philosophers, I have a strong dislike for logic. Life, and my actions in life, are
not based simply on what is true or false. My actions are not based on logical conditions such as This
And That, or That Or This, but on conditions that have fuzzy boundaries, are unclear or have some
truth in them but not the whole truth. It is not the current generation of digitally-controlled
computers that I have as my model, but the overall concepts of how computers perform tasks.
What does a word processing system do that could provide a reasonable model for how the mind
and the body interact? What does such a system have in common with the senses, memory and
pattern recognition that I want to base Trialism on?
A computer system consists of a series of input and output devices that are connected to some
hardware that contains both some memory for storing data and some devices for processing data.
For the purposes of my comparison I will only consider chip-based memory used to store data on the
motherboard as equivalent to the mind, with external memory devices such as discs or tape being
considered the equivalent of the books and CDs my memory uses to record things that I cannot
retain in my head.
Consider how a computer’s input devices match my senses. The principle input device used by my
word processor is a keyboard. Being English I use a QWERTY keyboard, but when in France I have to
use AZERTY keyboards. If I use a French keyboard with a French word processing program I have to
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type very slowly, checking the label on each key to ensure that I select the correct one. If, however, I
use it with an English word processor I can type normally by ignoring the labels on the keys and
typing, from memory, the keys that I know would appear on an UK keyboard. How is this possible? In
fact the key that is labelled A on the French keyboard but Q on the English keyboard does not
generate a different signal just because a French program is loaded. The difference in its effect
occurs because the software that is monitoring the keyboard knows that when it receives the code
that indicates that key has been pressed it needs to record the entry of the appropriate letter. But
even this is not sufficient to determine what is to go into memory. The program needs to check
whether Caps Lock is on or off, and whether or not the shift, control and or function keys are
pressed before it can determine whether to invoke a process or store one of two characters into
memory. The characters stored have no resemblance to the signal generated when the key is
pressed. What is stored is a binary code of either 8 or 16 digits, limited to 0 or 1. The key fact is that
the signal received from the keyboard has to be interpreted before it can be stored in a useful form
in memory. My data gathering senses work in exactly the same way. The signals sent by my eyes,
ears and the taste buds in my mouth must be processed before they can be stored in my memory in
a form that can be recalled and used later.
What about the output processes of a computer – how do these equate to the processes my mind
uses to control my body? When I press the key that is recorded as an A in memory, the program
checks where on the page the cursor is, what typeface is in force at that point, what type size is
being used, what the display screen resolution is, and what magnification is needed before
generating a pattern of pixels that will create for my vision the letter that corresponds to the key I
pressed. It will do all this in response to receiving a single binary code in an appropriate context. In
other contexts the same binary code, within the same program even, will generate a completely
different set of pixels in a completely different position, or a totally different instruction within a
processing chain. If I change my program a completely different set of processes might occur in
response to the same memory record. For example, if I want audio output then the memory of the
key press will be used, together with that of adjacent characters between two spaces, or other items
of punctuation, to generate sounds appropriate for the language being read. In such cases the sound
produce will differ for the same stored sequence of characters according to whether the program I
am using is designed to speak English or French, and how the word concerned uses the letter.
It is instructive to contrast this processing of French and English with what happens when the A key
is pressed on a Chinese keyboard. To capture Chinese text on a standard keyboard you need to use
predictive text techniques to select among a set of characters that have similar bases. Only when
multiple keys have been pressed sequentially can the required character be displayed for
selection/confirmation by the typist. When typing in the Pinyin equivalent of Chinese characters
vowels are used to identify tonal differences of the associated words. So when the stored word is
converted into audio the sounds chosen do not reflect what was typed in – the stored character and
its sound are just interpretations derived from a set of related actions on the part of the typist.
My body seems to work the same way. When I want to say a word that I am reading I look at the set
of characters between spaces, using context to determine between alternative meanings of the
word where appropriate. It seems to me that what I store in my memory is this derived meaning, not
the string of characters I see. When I want to say the sound in my memory I do not try to create the
sounds made by the individual letters but instead make the sounds that my memory has associated
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with the recorded meaning. I will make the same sound when thinking of C, the sea and what I see. If
I want to say “I see the Archbishop of C in his see by the sea” I will repeat the same sound for four
different meanings that I have in my mind. My mind does not confuse what I see from the see that
the Archbishop governs, and neither do you when parsing this sentence, even though the spelling of
the two words is identical. Context clearly differentiates them before they are memorised.
So where does all this interpretation take place? This is the problem I have with both Monism and
Dualism. These models do not clearly separate the processing of input signals and memories. They
do not clearly explain how senses such as those used for reading music are turned into actions such
as playing an instrument. Descartes nearly captures this process when he refers to “understanding”,
but does not clearly separate it from memory. The interpretation of the senses is the part of the
process that Descartes attributes to consciousness, something that he separates from the sense data
provided by the body. But this interpretation process is what Descartes refers to as ‘sense
perception’ – which seems to differ in someway from the process of “understanding”.
It seems to me that mind/body interaction needs to include the equivalent of a computer program,
and to involve some mechanism for using that program to process data stored in memory and create
the signals needed to generate actions within the body. There also needs to be some way of using
recorded data to generate other types of recorded data – the equivalent of my ability to consider
abstract concepts and to develop new concepts, such as those of proposed for Trialism, within my
mind without involving any form of input or output. Can my computing background help me to
explain these functions as well?
How does a digital computer process data? How is a computer able to determine that when a
particular key is pressed a particular set of pixels should be displayed at a particular point on a
display screen? This is not done in a single step. When you start up a computer there is a small
program, held in memory, known as a bootstrap program, that is used to load up something called
the operating system which is stored in memory. It is this bootstrap program that knows how to do
basic processes, such as to read data from memory, route data for processing, assign temporary
memory, etc. Only once the operating system has been loaded can you start to run a program such
as a word processing system. It is normally the operating system that identifies which key has been
pressed on which input device, and which pixels will be activated on the output device. It knows how
to convert the signals used by the software running under it. It is, however, the job of the software
to determine how to interpret inputs and how to combine this with what is stored in memory.
When I look at how my mind works I seem to see something similar going on. I was born with a set
of bootstrap reactions, which caused me to yell in response to signals indicating hunger, to suck
when I was presented with a source of food that I liked, to be sick when any food disagreed with my
stomach, and to record what was going on around me to a very limited extent. As I began to
experience more things my memory started to record some of these experiences, but obviously not
at that time in the form of words. So where did my capacity to store memories as words come from?
Why is it I speak and think in English, and not in French as Descartes did? Why is it that Descartes
never in his life thought “I think, therefore I am”. He would not originally have thought “Cogito, ergo
sum”. His thoughts would have been recorded in his memory in his native French, “Je pense, je suis”.
(This was the form the phrase took in the French edition of Meditations.) Why don’t my thoughts
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match those of the billions of Chinese who make up the bulk of the world’s population? My actions
match theirs, but my memories clearly don’t.
During my childhood I was loaded with an English language operating system. I was taught the
responses to make to certain sounds expressed using the English language, some of my efforts
involving generating sounds that were as close to the originals as possible, some involving using
different sounds. Later I was taught to convert the sounds I heard into words I wrote on paper, or
into drawings or into actions such as passing someone a toy. I was taught to read words on paper
and produce appropriate sounds in response to those words. I was also taught to look at pictures
and generate words, either spoken or written, that described what I saw. Some limited, but totally
unsuccessful attempts, were made to make me reproduce sounds I heard on musical instruments,
and to produce sounds using such instruments following instructions provided by a musical score,
but this part of my programming never worked properly.
I am still being programmed, formally through the Open University and informally through the
university of life. But now I do most of my programming myself. I am able to set myself tasks, learn
from my mistakes, and reprogram myself, if not to avoid making the same mistake at least to restart
the task without human intervention (though my wife doubts this some times!). How do I do this?
I certainly don’t program myself using digital processing, or through the application of logic. Most of
the time I do it using pattern recognition and probability theory. How do I know this? Let me give a
couple of examples, taken from the much discussed Duck-rabbit and Old Swiss Mill pictures.
Wittgenstein used Jastrow’s anomalous Duck-rabbit picture to highlight the difference between
seeing something and see-as something.
If I scan this picture from left to right I see a duck, starting with its bill and then its eye. If I scan the
same picture from right to left I see it as a rabbit, interpreting the bump at the bottom of the righthand curve as a mouth, followed by an eye and a pair of ears. There is, despite everything
philosophers have claimed, nothing mysterious in these two differing interpretations, its just a
question of what order I see features in when looking for a pattern match. If I am looking at a face I
expect to find a mouth/bill in front of the eyes and the ears behind the eyes. It is this order that
defines for me what a face is.
Note that if I turn the picture around the effects reverse:
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The famous Old Swiss Mill picture puzzle shows another aspect of how I do pattern matching. When
I look at the whole picture I see a man riding up to a mill in a mountain scene.
But when I concentrate on just one part of the image I can see different animals in the scene. If I
concentrate on the trees to the right I see the picture of a donkey:
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Notice how much clearer this image becomes once I have removed the adjacent parts of the image.
If I concentrate on the tree to the left what I see depends on whether I scan the image from left to
right or right to left:
Scanning from left to right I see a cat in the top of this segment of the picture. If I scan from right to
left I notice a man in the bottom of the segment, who can be viewed as wearing a hat or turban,
depending on how I interpret the area above the head. Again it is the order in which I encounter
significant features such as noses and mouths that determines what I recognize within the picture.
I use similar pattern matching processes when dealing with what is going on in the world. When I
come across a new situation the first thing I try to do is to remember when I last came across a
similar problem, and what I did then. Often I can do this unconsciously – and relevant processes start
up without my having to consciously think about them. Sometimes my limited memory means I can’t
immediately identify a matching situation. If I can, I wait and sleep on the problem, in the hope that
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the relevant memory can be retrieved from background storage when I stop using my brain for more
immediate processing tasks. Sometimes I have to admit I can’t find a good match for the current
situation. Then what I try to do is identify those parts of the situation for which I do have some
relevant processes that might help in some way. I then try, if I have time, to assess the probability of
this approach being successful. If I don’t have time I’m more than likely to try the matching actions
out in any case, unless there are some implications that might lead me into danger. This is typically
when I am led into error.
I, like many others, wish I knew how it is I am able to match patterns so successfully. How do I
recognize the difference between an A, a triangular shape, the triangle used in an orchestra, the side
of a pyramid or the end of a Toblerone bar? Pattern recognition technology is rapidly improving, but
is currently way behind human powers. In a recent (2008) test run on a supercomputer to check on
how well it could differentiate images of cats and dogs in over one thousand pictures the software
was only able to identify just over 60% correctly, while humans given the same task at 1 picture a
second were able to identify 96% successfully. And this was using still images. I suspect success rates
for computers on moving images would be much lower while for humans the success rate would
hardly drop. There is a concept introduced in psychology by Kenneth Craik, known as the mental
model theory of thinking and reasoning, which seems to come somewhere near what I actually seem
to do. According to a Trinity College Dublin website devoted to the subject, Craik’s concept was that:
the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental
models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of
discourse. They underlie visual images, but they can also be abstract, representing situations
that cannot be visualised. Each mental model represents a possibility. Mental models are
akin to architects' models or to physicists' diagrams in that their structure is analogous to
the structure of the situation that they represent, unlike, say, the structure of logical forms
used in formal rule theories. In this respect they are a little like pictures in the "picture"
theory of language described by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922.
This concept has been taken further by recent scholars such as Ruth Byrne at Trinity College Dublin
and Philip Johnson-Laird of Princeton, whose recent (2006) book on How We Reason is one of the
clearest explanations of current thinking on how memory models can be interpreted.
I like the idea that we only consider a small subset of the world around us when we interpret or
anticipate events. That certainly seems to agree with the way my mind seems to work. But I have
some reservations about the concept as currently expressed. In particular I have doubts that
deductive reasoning, of the type that can be done using the logic of digital computers, will be
sufficient for us to mimic how I reason about most events as I am rarely certain of the truth or falsity
of statements involved in my making judgements.
The key to my abilities seems to me to be controlled by how well I understand the context a pattern
occurs in. If the context is new, one I have rarely or never encountered, or has something unusual
about it, I know from experience that my matching performance will be worse than it normally is,
even without understanding how or why. In fact I often deduce from the fact that I am having
trouble making accurate matches that the situation I am in is one that has something unusual about
it. If I look down the street I expect to see cats. If I found one in my room I would in all likelihood
take a while to recognize it as I do not expect cats to enter my house. In the garden I am much
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quicker at identifying any cat that might be worrying my hens. I only have to see the tip of a tail to
know what it was that disturbed the hens. If I watch the reaction of the birds in my garden to planes
I can tell that they too use partial images to make decisions. If the plane flies into view over my
house or one of the adjacent ones they will immediately react to it by heading for cover, but if the
plane approaches at exactly the same height from the opposite direction, over the open field, they
will ignore it, having had time to think about what was approaching before it arrives.
Many of our actions are context dependent. Context is determined by our social conditioning as well
as our environment and events that occur at the same time. Often words that I can hear quite easily
at home are more difficult to hear in a noisy restaurant. I am currently trying to learn Spanish before
going on holiday. I can make out what is being said on the accompanying tape after a pause to think
about it, but when they start to string the sentences together I don’t have time to translate one
phrase before they say the next. When I am in a crowded restaurant on holiday I will be surprised if I
am able to make out even the simplest of phrases, and will have to survive on pre-canned
statements that I have learnt at home, never being sure I will use the right one in response to the
questions or statements made to me. I’m used to this inability of mine to understand others when in
a strange context, but am convinced I am not alone in this characteristic. I strongly suspect it is an
inherited characteristic of humans to be able to anticipate the sounds and sights they will encounter
in a given context so that they can respond to things quickly. I believe that until we can explain how
we anticipate events to computers it is unlikely that they will be able to match our ability to identify
the relevant features of a given context.
Feeling Lucky, Happy, Sleepy and Dozy
What does it mean to ‘feel lucky’ or ‘feel happy’? What is the difference between ‘feeling sleepy’
and ‘feeling dozy’? No, I’m not talking about sensations such as touching one of Snow White’s
dwarfs. I’m talking about what prompts me to use such terms to describe the way I am feeling. I feel
dozy in the morning when I have just woken up, but sleepy at night before going to bed. I feel happy
when I have completed an essay, but lucky when I identify how to answer a question. Is my choice of
descriptors controlled by context or do my internal feelings change? Is it just that I have learnt from
my parents and peers that the correct way to describe how I feel in the morning is dozy rather than
sleepy, and that society prefers me not to admit to being dozy in the evening but is happy with my
feeling sleepy then? Can Trialism help to answer such questions?
One of the observations that led me to a tripartite approach for describing the way the mind
interacts with the body was the fact that I think in words rather than images. In is seminal work on
the workings of the conscious and unconscious, The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud noted, while
discussing how we become conscious of our feelings, that:
“The part played by word-presentations now becomes perfectly clear. By their interposition
internal thought-processes are made into perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the
theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external perception. When a hypercathexis1 of
the process of thinking takes place, thoughts are actually perceived – as if they came from
without – and are consequently held to be true.”
1
Excessive accumulation of mental energy
© Martin Bryan, 2009
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In other words, Freud thinks we use words to turn thought processes from unconscious to conscious
events. He also thinks that whatever is perceived from without is always held to be true, which I am
not quite so convinced of, having read too many misleading newspaper articles. His theory,
however, certainly seems a good explanation for how I explain my feelings. But what process do I
have to undertake to match what I am feeling in my body to an appropriate word-presentation of
that feeling?
Does Trialism help us to understand our emotions?
There are many competing theories about how and why emotions occur. Some consider that
emotional feelings develop first and that these control our actions. Others suggest that evaluative
judgements precede both the feelings and the actions. Yet others attempt to tie emotions to
reasoning, either through the identification of cognitively rational beliefs that affect our short-term
reactions or as practically or strategically rational desires and actions designed to improve our lives
in the longer term. Other theories include issues such as our degree of concern with a judgement
and our level of commitment to beliefs. Can Trialism help us to understand how emotions work, or
to choose among the competing theories?
If Trialism is correct in requiring integration and interpretation of our senses before identifying an
emotional state that can be recorded in memory it would seem that a stage of interpretation must
occur before we can exhibit an emotion. But need this be an evaluative judgement? It seems that
evaluative judgement of emotions can only take place when existing memories are linked to sense
input. We must compare the actions or words that cause our fear, anger, jealousy, envy, etc, with
some set of stored expectations before we can evaluate a situation. This requires a process that links
the interpretation of sense input with information stored in the memory, a core concept in Trialism
as until we identify which word is appropriate for describing sense data we cannot record it in
memory.
Do the physiological changes that accompany emotions occur before or after this evaluation? I
would suggest that the physiological changes are triggered by the initial interpretation of sense data.
The changes are, therefore, caused by the interpretation of perceived events as leading to danger,
loss of social status, loss of love, failure to achieve goals, etc. Because Trialism clearly separates out
the processing required for the input and output of memory, it seems to provide a better model for
understanding emotional feelings that either the direct control of the mind by the body of Monism,
or of the separation of the mind from the body of Dualism.
What I suspect happens is that the initial interpretation of perceived events includes the comparison
of these events with patterns stored in memory and that when a match is found a previously learnt
set of reactions is triggered. Some of these reactions are inherited – these lead to our emotional
feelings, identifiable from an increase in heart rates, a change in facial expression, or the
development of nervous reactions such as sweating or blushing. Others are learnt through social
conditioning as we grow up. Different societies have different ways of expressing socially
conditioned reactions. The British, for example, are supposed to be not so demonstrative about love
as Italians, while the French are supposed to react to jealousy less than the English. I expect that
their emotional feelings do not differ much, even though the way in which they express these
feelings differs.
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It is the actions that result from the change in mental state caused by the identification of an
emotional situation that are subject to rational processes. These rational reactions can be controlled
by our minds because they involve identification, over a longer period of time, of patterns that
interconnect memories, without reference to senses. Again Trialism seems to provide a natural
model for such longer-term emotional reactions. Behaviour is controlled by mental states stored in
memory, using a more comprehensive set of rational criteria and rules than is required by the more
immediate pattern matching that links sense data to memory.
One of the key factors that differentiate the competing models of emotions is concerned with the
length of time we need to react to emotions. Those who feel that emotions start with feelings point
to the quickness with which these feelings are evoked. Those who think emotions are rationally
controlled tend to see emotions as a longer-term set of reactions. Trailism explains this difference
from the fact that the interpretation of integrated perceptions based on patterns stored in memory
is a fast, short-term process, while the processes required to determine the reactions required
through the interpretation of multiple memory states is a slower, longer-term process.
How does my idea that memory is stored in the form of words fit into this theory of emotions?
When I come to rationalize my feelings I use words to describe them. I am angry, happy, annoyed,
etc. How do I decide which words should be stored in my memory to record my feelings? The words
I use to describe my emotions are socially conditioned. I was taught the when I was frustrated in my
desire to go outside to play and reacted to this by hitting my mother I was what my parents called
“angry”, but when I failed to react other than saying that my aim had been frustrated I was simply
“annoyed”. It took me a long time to distinguish when I was angry from when I was annoyed! I was
told that I should be “happy” when I opened my birthday present, rather than annoyed that I did not
achieve my goal of a new train set. I later learnt that some experiences were what my teachers
called “nice”, and others were just “pleasant”. I still don’t know how to distinguish a nice experience
from a pleasant one, but I have learnt from many years of experience to identify the sort of
situations in which each of these words is most appropriate, and can now use the patterns stored in
my memory to identify which of the terms is most appropriate for a given situation. The key thing to
note is that I have recorded in my memory situations that provide a pattern that I can match to the
situation that I identify when interpreting my current perceptions. At present I am unclear whether
the pattern I have recorded in my memory is a set of related words, or if there is some other way in
which a pattern of events is recorded that allows me to quickly match my current set of perceptions
with what is recorded in my memory. I suspect that event relationships are recorded in addition to
words that summarize the events, but that I have no vocabulary for expressing how these
relationships are recorded.
Conclusion
I see Trialism as having three main inputs: senses, memory and pattern interpretation (see
illustration below). The interaction of these affects both feelings and behaviour. The interaction of
senses with pattern interpretation equates to what Descartes called ‘sense perception’. This fastacting process identifies what needs to be stored in our memory to account for what we perceive.
The slower-acting interaction between memory and pattern interpretation allows us to classify and
record useful patterns of events, and to adjust our interpretation to changes of situation or
knowledge. The interaction between memory and senses is what controls behaviour, whether
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inherited and automatic or learnt and reasoned. I see the intersection of all three inputs as being
necessary for what Descartes referred to as understanding.
In this preliminary paper I have not had set out demonstrate how my proposed split between the
senses, memory and our inherited and learnt pattern interpretation abilities can solve many of the
questions that philosophers and others have raised about how the mind and body interact. I expect
to have to tackle more of these issues in later papers if I am to convince others that my theory of
how the mind and body interact is preferable to those proposed by Dualists such as Descartes or
Monists such as Davidson. In showing how Trialism explains some of the findings of the competing
theories relating to how emotions come into force and are sustained I have started to show how a
tripartite view of the way in which our senses, memories and knowledge interact can help us to
come to terms with the conflicting evidence of psychological experiments.
Martin Bryan, March 2009
© Martin Bryan, 2009
I think, thereby I am
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