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“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind

125 points by CharlesW 1y ago

almosthere 1y ago
Just do stuff. To fix the mind, you have to keep busy. Don't focus on yourself, focus on projects. The long history of humanity, the last thing people did until recently was think about themselves. Stop. Do things.. basically touch grass.
- bbor 1y ago
  In the interest of staying within the rules of the site, I'll just say that this is a clueless, offensive, harmful comment. No, you don't know more than a 125+ years of psychologists studying mental health disorders because you make decent money right now and feel ok.
  - almosthere 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - d3ckard 1y ago
    I would like to provide a piece of anecdotal evidence: what he suggests actually worked for me best.
    - yeahsure 1y ago
      Just another N=1 anecdote: It didn’t work for me when I was dealing with depression a few years ago. I also lost a dear friend to suicide and he was very succesful and active on his field when it happened. Nobody saw it coming. It's just not that simple.
    - kayodelycaon 1y ago
      I truly hope it does but I have seen plenty of people use that strategy until something broke. As I see it, you can either deal with a problem on your own terms or you can let it eventually deal with you on its terms.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yeahsure 1y ago
  This comment comes across as quite naive. If the solution were truly that simple, we wouldn't see so much people suffering from depression, anxiety, addiction, etc. around the world.
- Trasmatta 1y ago
  Just "doing things" will not heal trauma. Doing things can be a way to try to suppress the pain of trauma, but it will still be there, just obscured and affecting the person's life in ways they can't seem to understand. And alternatively, trauma can also be a major blocker for actually being ABLE to do things.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Nothing quite like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause, am I right?
huijzer 1y ago
I have done a MSc in CS and PhD in psych dept. Sometimes I had the feeling that the system didn’t want me to get anything done.
- staunton 1y ago
  Can you elaborate? It's hard to take much away from your comment without any more details.
  - huijzer 1y ago
    Well peer review primarily is a very old system where nobody seems to care about speeding up the process. Why also are journals allowed to make huge amounts of money without paying the academics and without providing much services either.
ravenstine 1y ago
Maybe I'm missing the point of the article, but the application of cybernetics to psychology was already proposed (albeit not by a psychologist) at least as far back as 1960 in the book Psycho-cybernetics. This "new paradigm" doesn't sound particularly new. This sentence also puzzled me: > Lots of people agree that psychology is stuck because it doesn’t have a paradigm Psychology might not have a grand unifying paradigm, but it's been highly paradigm-driven since its inception.
- profstasiak 1y ago
  exactly. I cannot believe they mention cybernetics and psychology in one sentence: > The science of control systems is called cybernetics, so let’s call this approach cybernetic psychology. but they never mention psycho-cybernetics
floxy 1y ago
I always thought someone should make a second Matrix movie.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/566/ https://xkcd.com/566/
kogir 1y ago
Another example for all you computer folks out there: ultimately, all software engineering is just moving electrons around. But imagine how hard your job would be if you could only talk about electrons moving around. No arrays, stacks, nodes, graphs, algorithms—just those lil negatively charged bois and their comings and goings. I think this too easily skips over the fact that the abstractions are based on a knowledge of how things actually work - known with certainty. Nobody in CS is approaching the computer as an entirely black box and making up how they think or hope it works. When people don't know how the computer actually works, their code is wrong - they get bugs and vulnerabilities they don't understand and can't explain.
- manugo4 1y ago
  No, red is an abstraction that is not based on knowledge of how colors work.
  - ysofunny 1y ago
    it is an abstraction based on how our biological eyes work (this implies "knowledge" of physics) so it is indirectly based on knowledge of how color works, it's simply not physics as we understand it but it's "physics" as the biology of the eye "understands" it. red is an abstraction whose connection to how colors work is itself another abstraction, but of a much deeper complexity than 'red' which is a rather direct abstraction as far as abstraction can go nowadays
    - xboxnolifes 1y ago
      There is absolutely no knowledge needed for someone to point to something that is red and say "this is red" and then for you to associate things that roughly resemble that color to be red. Understanding the underlying concepts is irrelevant.
      - Finbel 1y ago
        Except I could think they mean the name of the thing, the size of the thing or a million other things. Especially if i have no knowledge of the underlying concept of colors.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
The cybernetic psychology idea of comparing sensed vs. desired states maps cleanly onto a PID controller: P reacts to the present error, I accumulates past errors, and D anticipates future ones. It's not just a comparator, it’s how long I’ve been off (I), how fast I’m drifting (D), and how far I am right now (P). In this framework, emotional regulation looks like control theory. Anxiety isn't just a feeling—it's high D-gain ie: a system overreacting to projected errors. Depression? Low P (blunted response), high I (burden of unresolved past errors), and broken D (no expected future improvement). Mania? Cranked P and D, and I disabled. In addition to personality being setpoints, our perceptions of the past, present, and future might just be PID parameters. What we call "disorders" are oscillations, deadzones, or gain mismatch. But like the article pointed out, it's not really a scientific theory unless it's falsifiable.
- p_v_doom 1y ago
  If we want to be pedantic both go back to cybernetics and the idea of the cybernetic loop.
- rini17 1y ago
  But as recent AI advancement hints at, these states are highly manydimensional. And in such spaces our intuitions fall apart. Even simple gradient descent works quite differently when you have millions of almost-cardinal directions to pick at any point, and PID regulation is even more complex. And even in 3D the plain PID just can't do when the space is discrete or when there are large signal delays relative to response time of the system. We don't say "oh it's got anxiety" lol but we replace it with updated algorithm.
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    That sounds like a great research question, "Given this model[1], what's the dimensionality of the space?" 1. Or more accurately, a model in this family
- hnuser123456 1y ago
  This is tempting, because we have a tight grip of control theory. However, there are thousands of things you could measure, and picking one at a time to improve could be catastrophic. Give a severely depressed person a big bump in motivation and nothing else, and it might be their end. We'll need to pick a collection of probably at least 100 measurements of various personality facets, try different therapies and medicines, and see which ones reduce the average error the most for different starting conditions. And do this consistently. Then, maybe we can say things like "given your scenario, treatment X will improve your overall condition the most but may leave these facets suboptimal, and treatment Y will provide a slightly lower overall improvement but does better for these facets you were most concerned about" with actual mathematical confidence.
floxy 1y ago
Someone need to get the author a copy of GEB.
hybrid_study 1y ago
From a layman's perspective I've yet to find a better understanding of psychology than what Steven Pinker posits in hist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works (1997), and even today it doesn't seem like the basic paradigm (the evolutionary constraints) has changed much.
RetroTechie 1y ago
Interesting concepts there, as applied to psychology. And kudos for making it available freely. Definitely worth a read imho! Skimming through its chapter on AI, made me think of Dave from EEVblog fame. In some of his videos he wears a T-shirt saying "always give negative feedback!". Which is correct - for those who understand electronics (specifically: opamps). In short: design circuit such that when output is above target, circuit works to lower it (voltage, in this context). When below, circuit works to raise it. Output stability requires a feedback loop constructed to that effect. There's analogies in many fields of technology (logistics, data buffering, manufacturing, etc etc, and yes, thermostats). I'll leave it there, other sites like Wikipedia (or EEVblog!) better explain opamp-related design principles. From what I've read, current AI systems appear like opamp circuitry with no (or poor) feedback loop: a minor swing in input causes output to go crazy. Or even positive feedback: same thing, but self-reinforcing. Guardrails are not the fix: they just clip the output to ehm.. 'politically correct' or whatever. Proper fix = better designed feedback loops. So yes, authors of this book may definitely be onto something.
- jotux 1y ago
  An emotional analogy I've often made, related to EE, is automatic gain control. When you experience long periods of emotional stability without significant highs or lows, your brain applies a form of gain control. This makes the threshold for something amazing very low and something awful very high. As a result, people can feel overwhelmed by relatively trivial issues. Many self-help books, religions, and philosophies emphasize appreciating past experiences or considering how situations could have been worse. I see this as a way to counteract the brain's natural tendency to adjust its gain control.
- temp0826 1y ago
  Been a long time since my ee courses (a degree I never used...but I digress...). How did that saying go? Want an oscillator? Design an amplifier. Want an amplifier? Design an oscillator.
dogleash 1y ago
The control loop metaphor was an interesting idea until I started worrying halfway through that it would would be operating on something with all the same categorical problems as the impressionistic style derided the start. The sensations we tie to urination or breathing have quick cycle times making it easy to test the causal loop. Thus confounding factors such as a UTI causing a bladder full sensation, or nitrogen asphyxiation without feeling suffocation are things we understand well. The "Make Sure You Spend Time with Other People System" is a good example for a blog post but it’s already a fair bit looser. But when you consider they want to investigate things without preexisting understanding as well as we understand loneliness it smells like sneaking back towards tautologically defined systems like "zest for life."
perching_aix 1y ago
For those looking to skip the yap, an overview of the titular "new paradigm" starts a third of the way in, at the section "A GOOD WAY NOT TO DIE".
- procaryote 1y ago
  Thank you It's still just fluff though. So the author thinks the mind is a control system... Sure, that's a model. Does it explain observations better? What predictions does this model let us make that differ from other models? The article was needlessly wordy that I might have missed if this was hiding somewhere
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    I felt the same way, so I just stopped reading shortly after - can't tell you, sorry.
- vl 1y ago
  I put text of the article into ChatGPT 4.5 and used various questions to extract relevant and interesting bits and pieces. Great use case for LLMs.
jondlm 1y ago
The topic of this article felt familiar to me. It's similar to ideas in IFS: internal family systems. IFS also uses control systems to describe our internal landscape. If the concept of multiplicity (we humans being a system of smaller systems) resonates with you, consider reading No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz. I've personally found it immensely helpful.
- Melatonic 1y ago
  Ive heard about this and also some newer works based partially on IFS. Looks very interesting
standardUser 1y ago
The monopoly analogy is brilliant and I appreciate the author's focus on the important of language and terms. Plus, the gentle but brutal takedown of academic orthodoxy, such as... > Those divisions are given by the dean, not by nature.
ebolyen 1y ago
If anyone is interested in a more formal descriptions of these control-loops, with more testable mechanisms, check out the concept of reward-taxis. Here are two neat papers that I think are more closely related than might initially appear: "Is Human Behavior Just Running and Tumbling?": https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzvn9_v1 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzvn9_v1 (This used to be a blog post, but its down, so here's a essentially identical preprint.) A scale-invariant control-loop such as chemotaxis may still be the root algorithm we use, just adjusted for a dopamine gradient mediated by the prefrontal cortex. "Give-up-itis: Neuropathology of extremis": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987718306145 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069... What happens when that dopamine gradient shuts down?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ikesau 1y ago
what's unclear to me is how you identify the Real Units. needing-to-breathe-ness is (probably) a gimme, but what are the units that will explain which route i take on my walk today? and how do you avoid defining units that aren't impressionistic once you need to rely on language and testimony to understand your research subject's mental state? my understanding of psychological constructs is that they're earnest attempts to try and resolve this problem, even if they've led us to the tautological confusion we're in now.
agos 1y ago
> Imagine how hopeless we would be if we approached medicine this way, lumping together both Black Lung and the common cold as “coughing diseases”, even though the treatment for one of them is “bed rest and fluids” and the treatment for the other one is “get a different job”. Well, this is definitely happening for some parts of medicine, like IBS or many forms of chronic pain. > If you feel like you’re drowning, your Oxygen Governor is like “I GIVE THIS A -1000!”. When you can breathe again, though, maybe you only get the -1000 to go away, and you don’t get any happiness on top of that. You feel much better than you did before, but you don’t feel good. Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did.
- vanderZwan 1y ago
  I was going to say the same thing: medicine does this all the time. The crucial thing to keep in mind though is that it usually has a decent awareness of the difference between when it has a decent working model of underlying causes, or if it is currently stuck at a "least-terrible reverse-engineered behavioral rule of thumb" stage of understanding. The latter can still often be better than doing nothing, and what kind of doctor would choose to not help their patient just because they don't understand why the cure works most of the time? > Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did. I don't know you but glad you're still with us, first of all. Anyway, I think the author was trying to say that the feeling of relief doesn't typically make one seek out the experience of drowning again. Although benign masochism exists of course (which is the technical term for the way people can learn to enjoy negative emotions and experiences). Which probably would be an interesting thing to explore using this cybernetics approach.
kgwxd 1y ago
Flagged? The article appears to have triggered some very interesting discussions here. Exactly the stated purpose. Should we all go back to talking about how the government and billionaires are ruining the world instead?
- vixen99 1y ago
  And line I really liked: 'But really, I like cybernetic psychology because it stands a chance of becoming overturnable.'
marviel 1y ago
There are two good books that explore this concept from different angles: "The Emotion Machine", by Marvin Minksy (the AI view) & "The Art of Empathy", by Karla McLaren (the Internal / Emotional View)
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
winddude 1y ago
I'm being pydantic, "So unlike the thermostat in your house, which doesn’t have to contend with any other control systems, all of the governors of the mind have to fight with each other constantly.", but what about automated blinds, self tinting windows, automatic skylights, humidistats, and humans open and closing windows. It's also important to note that other control systems in the body that affect control systems in the mind, eg. endocrine.
Animats 1y ago
That's a book review. Read the actual book.[1] Notes: - Prologue: (Behaviorism) ended up being a terrible way to do psychology, but it was admirable for being an attempt at describing the whole business in terms of a few simple entities and rules. It was precise enough to be wrong, rather than vague to the point of being unassailable, which has been the rule in most of psychology. - Thermostat: An intro to control theory, but one which ignores stability. Maxwell's original paper, "On Governors", (1868) is still worth reading. He didn't just discover electromagnetics, he founded control theory. Has the usual problems with applying this to emotions, and the author realizes this. OK, so living things have a lot of feedback control systems. This is not a new observation. The biological term is "homeostasis", a concept apparently first described in 1849 and named in 1926. (There are claims that this concept dates from Aristotle, who wrote about "habit", but Aristotle didn't really get feedback control. Too early.) - Motivation: Pick goals with highest need level, but have some hysteresis to avoid toggling between behaviors too fast. - Conflict and oscillation: Author discovers oscillation and stability in feedback systems. - What is going on? Author tries to derive control theory. - Interlude Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, which was peak fascination with feedback in the 1950s. - Artificial intelligence "But humans and all other biological intelligences are cybernetic minimizers, not reward maximizers. We track multiple error signals and try to reduce them to zero. If all our errors are at zero — if you’re on the beach in Tahiti, a drink in your hand, air and water both the perfect temperature — we are mostly comfortable to lounge around on our chaise. As a result, it’s not actually clear if it’s possible to build a maximizing intelligence. The only intelligences that exist are minimizing. There has never been a truly intelligent reward maximizer (if there had, we would likely all be dead), so there is no proof of concept. The main reason to suspect AI is possible is that natural intelligence already exists — us." Hm. That's worth some thought. An argument against it is that there are clearly people driven by the desire for "more", with no visible upper bound. - Animal welfare Finally, "consciousness". It speaks well of the author that it took this long to bring that up. It's brought up in the context of whether animals are conscious, and, if so, which animals. - Dynamic methods Failure modes of multiple feedback systems, plus some pop psychology. - Other methods Much like the previous chapter - Help wanted "If the proposal is more or less right, then this is the start of a scientific revolution." Not seeing the revolution here. Most of the ideas here have been seen before. Did I miss something? Feedback is important, but the author doesn't seem to have done enough of it to have a good understanding. If you want an intuitive grasp of feedback, play with some op amps set up as an analog computer and watch the output on a scope. Or find a simulator. If The Analog Thing came with a scope (which, at its price point, it should) that would be ideal. Watch control loops with feedback and delay stabilize, oscillate, or limit. There are browser-based tools which do this, but they assume basic electrical engineering knowledge. [1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-wheel-prologue-everybody-wants-a-rock/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-whe...
p_v_doom 1y ago
Don't think this is a new paradigm. More of a revival of an old one - that of cybernetics. It was incredibly successful at the time, to the point where so many of its findings today are integral to our world, and we kind of forget where they come from and the original principles behind them. I am happy to see this revival though, I think it heralds good stuff...
vanderZwan 1y ago
In short, the brain is a complex dynamic feedback system and cybernetics is a really good way to break down complex dynamic feedback systems? Seems like an obviously sensible take. One thing I'm missing here is the idea of context. To give a very concrete example from personal experience: I'm colorblind (protanomaly, meaning one of my color cones is miscalibrated, which can actually be partially "corrected" for by manipulating the input spectrum a.k.a. wearing specifically shaded glasses). As a result I've learned a lot about color theory over the years. One fun thing is that if you look at the history of color perception theories, once we realized what the eye is made of we started with coming up with ever more sophisticated models for each of our cones for a while, which was a great improvement... and then someone realized "hey, the way I perceive this shade of red also depends on which color it is surrounded by", and if you want to model that accurately then things get really complicated (it's also usually not needed for accurately storing and then later reproducing colors). But it explains things like a question of "what color is the dress?" taking the internet by storm. So if we look at the "control systems" of the brain, I bet those "target values" will be a combination of static baseline plus contextual correction from other control systems. And teasing that apart will be quite a task.
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
I’m very excited to see that cybernetic thinking is finding its way into a more mainstream audience as people are understanding the generality of computing systems in the longest term I have not read the book in question yet so I will reserve judgment however based on this post it would seem that the majority of its claims have already been captured in much more specific detail in the 2018 Sutton and Barto reinforcement learning textbook (1). Specifically, if you look through section 3 chapters 14 and 15, they specifically address the psychology and neuroscience congruence with the TD(L) algorithms and Bellman reward updating to solve the HMM and markov decision process generally. The newest TD Lambda paper from this year goes even further link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14606 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14606 Exciting times ahead 1 -https://archive.org/details/rlbook2018 https://archive.org/details/rlbook2018
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
>> Here’s the meat of The Mind in the Wheel: the mind is made out of units called control systems. I see someone re-invented Rodney Brooks' Subsumption Architecture [1]. It's a good idea but it doesn't work. Enfin, it works, but up to a certain point, which is how well robotics work today. Yes roombas and industrial robots. No robot maids/butlers and no level-5 self-driving cars. Sure doesn't work as a model of a human mind. I don't think Brooks even had the temerity to suggest it should tbh. More importantly this just goes to show what happens when psychologists and AI scientists stop talking to each other, the former because they're lost up their own bums [2] and the latter because they've switched focus to creating the next automated shaker of the magick money tree. What happens is that the ... well, wheel, keeps getting reinvented, over and over again, and nobody is really trying to make, you know, a vehicle. With wheels. That do something else than just sit there being wheel-y. _________________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture [2] I just mean the reproducibility crisis.

125 points by CharlesW 1y ago

Just do stuff. To fix the mind, you have to keep busy. Don't focus on yourself, focus on projects. The long history of humanity, the last thing people did until recently was think about themselves. Stop. Do things.. basically touch grass.

bbor 1y ago
In the interest of staying within the rules of the site, I'll just say that this is a clueless, offensive, harmful comment. No, you don't know more than a 125+ years of psychologists studying mental health disorders because you make decent money right now and feel ok.
- almosthere 1y ago
  [flagged]
- d3ckard 1y ago
  I would like to provide a piece of anecdotal evidence: what he suggests actually worked for me best.
  - yeahsure 1y ago
    Just another N=1 anecdote: It didn’t work for me when I was dealing with depression a few years ago. I also lost a dear friend to suicide and he was very succesful and active on his field when it happened. Nobody saw it coming. It's just not that simple.
  - kayodelycaon 1y ago
    I truly hope it does but I have seen plenty of people use that strategy until something broke. As I see it, you can either deal with a problem on your own terms or you can let it eventually deal with you on its terms.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
yeahsure 1y ago
This comment comes across as quite naive. If the solution were truly that simple, we wouldn't see so much people suffering from depression, anxiety, addiction, etc. around the world.
Trasmatta 1y ago
Just "doing things" will not heal trauma. Doing things can be a way to try to suppress the pain of trauma, but it will still be there, just obscured and affecting the person's life in ways they can't seem to understand. And alternatively, trauma can also be a major blocker for actually being ABLE to do things.
perching_aix 1y ago
Nothing quite like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause, am I right?

huijzer 1y ago

I have done a MSc in CS and PhD in psych dept. Sometimes I had the feeling that the system didn’t want me to get anything done.

staunton 1y ago
Can you elaborate? It's hard to take much away from your comment without any more details.
- huijzer 1y ago
  Well peer review primarily is a very old system where nobody seems to care about speeding up the process. Why also are journals allowed to make huge amounts of money without paying the academics and without providing much services either.

ravenstine 1y ago

Maybe I'm missing the point of the article, but the application of cybernetics to psychology was already proposed (albeit not by a psychologist) at least as far back as 1960 in the book Psycho-cybernetics. This "new paradigm" doesn't sound particularly new. This sentence also puzzled me: > Lots of people agree that psychology is stuck because it doesn’t have a paradigm Psychology might not have a grand unifying paradigm, but it's been highly paradigm-driven since its inception.

profstasiak 1y ago
exactly. I cannot believe they mention cybernetics and psychology in one sentence: > The science of control systems is called cybernetics, so let’s call this approach cybernetic psychology. but they never mention psycho-cybernetics

floxy 1y ago

I always thought someone should make a second Matrix movie.

psunavy03 1y ago
https://xkcd.com/566/ https://xkcd.com/566/

kogir 1y ago

Another example for all you computer folks out there: ultimately, all software engineering is just moving electrons around. But imagine how hard your job would be if you could only talk about electrons moving around. No arrays, stacks, nodes, graphs, algorithms—just those lil negatively charged bois and their comings and goings. I think this too easily skips over the fact that the abstractions are based on a knowledge of how things actually work - known with certainty. Nobody in CS is approaching the computer as an entirely black box and making up how they think or hope it works. When people don't know how the computer actually works, their code is wrong - they get bugs and vulnerabilities they don't understand and can't explain.

manugo4 1y ago
No, red is an abstraction that is not based on knowledge of how colors work.
- ysofunny 1y ago
  it is an abstraction based on how our biological eyes work (this implies "knowledge" of physics) so it is indirectly based on knowledge of how color works, it's simply not physics as we understand it but it's "physics" as the biology of the eye "understands" it. red is an abstraction whose connection to how colors work is itself another abstraction, but of a much deeper complexity than 'red' which is a rather direct abstraction as far as abstraction can go nowadays
  - xboxnolifes 1y ago
    There is absolutely no knowledge needed for someone to point to something that is red and say "this is red" and then for you to associate things that roughly resemble that color to be red. Understanding the underlying concepts is irrelevant.
    - Finbel 1y ago
      Except I could think they mean the name of the thing, the size of the thing or a million other things. Especially if i have no knowledge of the underlying concept of colors.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

The cybernetic psychology idea of comparing sensed vs. desired states maps cleanly onto a PID controller: P reacts to the present error, I accumulates past errors, and D anticipates future ones. It's not just a comparator, it’s how long I’ve been off (I), how fast I’m drifting (D), and how far I am right now (P). In this framework, emotional regulation looks like control theory. Anxiety isn't just a feeling—it's high D-gain ie: a system overreacting to projected errors. Depression? Low P (blunted response), high I (burden of unresolved past errors), and broken D (no expected future improvement). Mania? Cranked P and D, and I disabled. In addition to personality being setpoints, our perceptions of the past, present, and future might just be PID parameters. What we call "disorders" are oscillations, deadzones, or gain mismatch. But like the article pointed out, it's not really a scientific theory unless it's falsifiable.

p_v_doom 1y ago
If we want to be pedantic both go back to cybernetics and the idea of the cybernetic loop.
rini17 1y ago
But as recent AI advancement hints at, these states are highly manydimensional. And in such spaces our intuitions fall apart. Even simple gradient descent works quite differently when you have millions of almost-cardinal directions to pick at any point, and PID regulation is even more complex. And even in 3D the plain PID just can't do when the space is discrete or when there are large signal delays relative to response time of the system. We don't say "oh it's got anxiety" lol but we replace it with updated algorithm.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  That sounds like a great research question, "Given this model[1], what's the dimensionality of the space?" 1. Or more accurately, a model in this family
hnuser123456 1y ago
This is tempting, because we have a tight grip of control theory. However, there are thousands of things you could measure, and picking one at a time to improve could be catastrophic. Give a severely depressed person a big bump in motivation and nothing else, and it might be their end. We'll need to pick a collection of probably at least 100 measurements of various personality facets, try different therapies and medicines, and see which ones reduce the average error the most for different starting conditions. And do this consistently. Then, maybe we can say things like "given your scenario, treatment X will improve your overall condition the most but may leave these facets suboptimal, and treatment Y will provide a slightly lower overall improvement but does better for these facets you were most concerned about" with actual mathematical confidence.

floxy 1y ago

Someone need to get the author a copy of GEB.

hybrid_study 1y ago

From a layman's perspective I've yet to find a better understanding of psychology than what Steven Pinker posits in hist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works (1997), and even today it doesn't seem like the basic paradigm (the evolutionary constraints) has changed much.

RetroTechie 1y ago

Interesting concepts there, as applied to psychology. And kudos for making it available freely. Definitely worth a read imho! Skimming through its chapter on AI, made me think of Dave from EEVblog fame. In some of his videos he wears a T-shirt saying "always give negative feedback!". Which is correct - for those who understand electronics (specifically: opamps). In short: design circuit such that when output is above target, circuit works to lower it (voltage, in this context). When below, circuit works to raise it. Output stability requires a feedback loop constructed to that effect. There's analogies in many fields of technology (logistics, data buffering, manufacturing, etc etc, and yes, thermostats). I'll leave it there, other sites like Wikipedia (or EEVblog!) better explain opamp-related design principles. From what I've read, current AI systems appear like opamp circuitry with no (or poor) feedback loop: a minor swing in input causes output to go crazy. Or even positive feedback: same thing, but self-reinforcing. Guardrails are not the fix: they just clip the output to ehm.. 'politically correct' or whatever. Proper fix = better designed feedback loops. So yes, authors of this book may definitely be onto something.

jotux 1y ago
An emotional analogy I've often made, related to EE, is automatic gain control. When you experience long periods of emotional stability without significant highs or lows, your brain applies a form of gain control. This makes the threshold for something amazing very low and something awful very high. As a result, people can feel overwhelmed by relatively trivial issues. Many self-help books, religions, and philosophies emphasize appreciating past experiences or considering how situations could have been worse. I see this as a way to counteract the brain's natural tendency to adjust its gain control.
temp0826 1y ago
Been a long time since my ee courses (a degree I never used...but I digress...). How did that saying go? Want an oscillator? Design an amplifier. Want an amplifier? Design an oscillator.

dogleash 1y ago

The control loop metaphor was an interesting idea until I started worrying halfway through that it would would be operating on something with all the same categorical problems as the impressionistic style derided the start. The sensations we tie to urination or breathing have quick cycle times making it easy to test the causal loop. Thus confounding factors such as a UTI causing a bladder full sensation, or nitrogen asphyxiation without feeling suffocation are things we understand well. The "Make Sure You Spend Time with Other People System" is a good example for a blog post but it’s already a fair bit looser. But when you consider they want to investigate things without preexisting understanding as well as we understand loneliness it smells like sneaking back towards tautologically defined systems like "zest for life."

perching_aix 1y ago

For those looking to skip the yap, an overview of the titular "new paradigm" starts a third of the way in, at the section "A GOOD WAY NOT TO DIE".

procaryote 1y ago
Thank you It's still just fluff though. So the author thinks the mind is a control system... Sure, that's a model. Does it explain observations better? What predictions does this model let us make that differ from other models? The article was needlessly wordy that I might have missed if this was hiding somewhere
- perching_aix 1y ago
  I felt the same way, so I just stopped reading shortly after - can't tell you, sorry.
vl 1y ago
I put text of the article into ChatGPT 4.5 and used various questions to extract relevant and interesting bits and pieces. Great use case for LLMs.

jondlm 1y ago

The topic of this article felt familiar to me. It's similar to ideas in IFS: internal family systems. IFS also uses control systems to describe our internal landscape. If the concept of multiplicity (we humans being a system of smaller systems) resonates with you, consider reading No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz. I've personally found it immensely helpful.

Melatonic 1y ago
Ive heard about this and also some newer works based partially on IFS. Looks very interesting

standardUser 1y ago

The monopoly analogy is brilliant and I appreciate the author's focus on the important of language and terms. Plus, the gentle but brutal takedown of academic orthodoxy, such as... > Those divisions are given by the dean, not by nature.

ebolyen 1y ago

If anyone is interested in a more formal descriptions of these control-loops, with more testable mechanisms, check out the concept of reward-taxis. Here are two neat papers that I think are more closely related than might initially appear: "Is Human Behavior Just Running and Tumbling?": https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzvn9_v1 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzvn9_v1 (This used to be a blog post, but its down, so here's a essentially identical preprint.) A scale-invariant control-loop such as chemotaxis may still be the root algorithm we use, just adjusted for a dopamine gradient mediated by the prefrontal cortex. "Give-up-itis: Neuropathology of extremis": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987718306145 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069... What happens when that dopamine gradient shuts down?

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ikesau 1y ago

what's unclear to me is how you identify the Real Units. needing-to-breathe-ness is (probably) a gimme, but what are the units that will explain which route i take on my walk today? and how do you avoid defining units that aren't impressionistic once you need to rely on language and testimony to understand your research subject's mental state? my understanding of psychological constructs is that they're earnest attempts to try and resolve this problem, even if they've led us to the tautological confusion we're in now.

agos 1y ago

> Imagine how hopeless we would be if we approached medicine this way, lumping together both Black Lung and the common cold as “coughing diseases”, even though the treatment for one of them is “bed rest and fluids” and the treatment for the other one is “get a different job”. Well, this is definitely happening for some parts of medicine, like IBS or many forms of chronic pain. > If you feel like you’re drowning, your Oxygen Governor is like “I GIVE THIS A -1000!”. When you can breathe again, though, maybe you only get the -1000 to go away, and you don’t get any happiness on top of that. You feel much better than you did before, but you don’t feel good. Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did.

vanderZwan 1y ago
I was going to say the same thing: medicine does this all the time. The crucial thing to keep in mind though is that it usually has a decent awareness of the difference between when it has a decent working model of underlying causes, or if it is currently stuck at a "least-terrible reverse-engineered behavioral rule of thumb" stage of understanding. The latter can still often be better than doing nothing, and what kind of doctor would choose to not help their patient just because they don't understand why the cure works most of the time? > Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did. I don't know you but glad you're still with us, first of all. Anyway, I think the author was trying to say that the feeling of relief doesn't typically make one seek out the experience of drowning again. Although benign masochism exists of course (which is the technical term for the way people can learn to enjoy negative emotions and experiences). Which probably would be an interesting thing to explore using this cybernetics approach.

kgwxd 1y ago

Flagged? The article appears to have triggered some very interesting discussions here. Exactly the stated purpose. Should we all go back to talking about how the government and billionaires are ruining the world instead?

vixen99 1y ago
And line I really liked: 'But really, I like cybernetic psychology because it stands a chance of becoming overturnable.'

marviel 1y ago

There are two good books that explore this concept from different angles: "The Emotion Machine", by Marvin Minksy (the AI view) & "The Art of Empathy", by Karla McLaren (the Internal / Emotional View)

curtisszmania 1y ago

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winddude 1y ago

I'm being pydantic, "So unlike the thermostat in your house, which doesn’t have to contend with any other control systems, all of the governors of the mind have to fight with each other constantly.", but what about automated blinds, self tinting windows, automatic skylights, humidistats, and humans open and closing windows. It's also important to note that other control systems in the body that affect control systems in the mind, eg. endocrine.

Animats 1y ago

That's a book review. Read the actual book.[1] Notes: - Prologue: (Behaviorism) ended up being a terrible way to do psychology, but it was admirable for being an attempt at describing the whole business in terms of a few simple entities and rules. It was precise enough to be wrong, rather than vague to the point of being unassailable, which has been the rule in most of psychology. - Thermostat: An intro to control theory, but one which ignores stability. Maxwell's original paper, "On Governors", (1868) is still worth reading. He didn't just discover electromagnetics, he founded control theory. Has the usual problems with applying this to emotions, and the author realizes this. OK, so living things have a lot of feedback control systems. This is not a new observation. The biological term is "homeostasis", a concept apparently first described in 1849 and named in 1926. (There are claims that this concept dates from Aristotle, who wrote about "habit", but Aristotle didn't really get feedback control. Too early.) - Motivation: Pick goals with highest need level, but have some hysteresis to avoid toggling between behaviors too fast. - Conflict and oscillation: Author discovers oscillation and stability in feedback systems. - What is going on? Author tries to derive control theory. - Interlude Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, which was peak fascination with feedback in the 1950s. - Artificial intelligence "But humans and all other biological intelligences are cybernetic minimizers, not reward maximizers. We track multiple error signals and try to reduce them to zero. If all our errors are at zero — if you’re on the beach in Tahiti, a drink in your hand, air and water both the perfect temperature — we are mostly comfortable to lounge around on our chaise. As a result, it’s not actually clear if it’s possible to build a maximizing intelligence. The only intelligences that exist are minimizing. There has never been a truly intelligent reward maximizer (if there had, we would likely all be dead), so there is no proof of concept. The main reason to suspect AI is possible is that natural intelligence already exists — us." Hm. That's worth some thought. An argument against it is that there are clearly people driven by the desire for "more", with no visible upper bound. - Animal welfare Finally, "consciousness". It speaks well of the author that it took this long to bring that up. It's brought up in the context of whether animals are conscious, and, if so, which animals. - Dynamic methods Failure modes of multiple feedback systems, plus some pop psychology. - Other methods Much like the previous chapter - Help wanted "If the proposal is more or less right, then this is the start of a scientific revolution." Not seeing the revolution here. Most of the ideas here have been seen before. Did I miss something? Feedback is important, but the author doesn't seem to have done enough of it to have a good understanding. If you want an intuitive grasp of feedback, play with some op amps set up as an analog computer and watch the output on a scope. Or find a simulator. If The Analog Thing came with a scope (which, at its price point, it should) that would be ideal. Watch control loops with feedback and delay stabilize, oscillate, or limit. There are browser-based tools which do this, but they assume basic electrical engineering knowledge. [1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-wheel-prologue-everybody-wants-a-rock/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-whe...

p_v_doom 1y ago

Don't think this is a new paradigm. More of a revival of an old one - that of cybernetics. It was incredibly successful at the time, to the point where so many of its findings today are integral to our world, and we kind of forget where they come from and the original principles behind them. I am happy to see this revival though, I think it heralds good stuff...

vanderZwan 1y ago

In short, the brain is a complex dynamic feedback system and cybernetics is a really good way to break down complex dynamic feedback systems? Seems like an obviously sensible take. One thing I'm missing here is the idea of context. To give a very concrete example from personal experience: I'm colorblind (protanomaly, meaning one of my color cones is miscalibrated, which can actually be partially "corrected" for by manipulating the input spectrum a.k.a. wearing specifically shaded glasses). As a result I've learned a lot about color theory over the years. One fun thing is that if you look at the history of color perception theories, once we realized what the eye is made of we started with coming up with ever more sophisticated models for each of our cones for a while, which was a great improvement... and then someone realized "hey, the way I perceive this shade of red also depends on which color it is surrounded by", and if you want to model that accurately then things get really complicated (it's also usually not needed for accurately storing and then later reproducing colors). But it explains things like a question of "what color is the dress?" taking the internet by storm. So if we look at the "control systems" of the brain, I bet those "target values" will be a combination of static baseline plus contextual correction from other control systems. And teasing that apart will be quite a task.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

I’m very excited to see that cybernetic thinking is finding its way into a more mainstream audience as people are understanding the generality of computing systems in the longest term I have not read the book in question yet so I will reserve judgment however based on this post it would seem that the majority of its claims have already been captured in much more specific detail in the 2018 Sutton and Barto reinforcement learning textbook (1). Specifically, if you look through section 3 chapters 14 and 15, they specifically address the psychology and neuroscience congruence with the TD(L) algorithms and Bellman reward updating to solve the HMM and markov decision process generally. The newest TD Lambda paper from this year goes even further link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14606 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14606 Exciting times ahead 1 -https://archive.org/details/rlbook2018 https://archive.org/details/rlbook2018

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago

>> Here’s the meat of The Mind in the Wheel: the mind is made out of units called control systems. I see someone re-invented Rodney Brooks' Subsumption Architecture [1]. It's a good idea but it doesn't work. Enfin, it works, but up to a certain point, which is how well robotics work today. Yes roombas and industrial robots. No robot maids/butlers and no level-5 self-driving cars. Sure doesn't work as a model of a human mind. I don't think Brooks even had the temerity to suggest it should tbh. More importantly this just goes to show what happens when psychologists and AI scientists stop talking to each other, the former because they're lost up their own bums [2] and the latter because they've switched focus to creating the next automated shaker of the magick money tree. What happens is that the ... well, wheel, keeps getting reinvented, over and over again, and nobody is really trying to make, you know, a vehicle. With wheels. That do something else than just sit there being wheel-y. _________________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture [2] I just mean the reproducibility crisis.