Breakdown of Will

excerpts from George Ainslie

Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2005:28)

how does an internal marketplace that disproportionately values immediate rewards grow into what can be mistaken for the long-range reward-maximizer of conventional utility theory?

where alternative rewards are available at different times, each will build its own interest. Such interests are not options chosen by an overarching ego, the top-down model assumed by holistic theorists, but rather function as quasi-independent agents that have grown to exploit particular sources of reward over particular time ranges

Ulysses planning for the Sirens must treat Ulysses hearing them as a separate person, whom he must influence if possible and forestall if not. If what you do regularly gets undone later, you learn to stop doing it - but not out of agreement with a later self, but out of realism.

..and the gist of later conditioning research has been that conditioning does not control responses at all; the pairing of stimuli connects only the stimuli, not responses (!)

[forty years ago] pigeons were shown to actively avoid being offered the option of doing poorly rewarded work for food, instead of simply not doing the work when offered. The mere chance to work for food became aversive, even though the subjects did the work when it was offered, or rather [it became aversive] because they did the work when it was offered.

pain can't be the simple opposite of reward that is often assumed, because it could not then oblige people to attend to it.

The frequent philosophical assertion that emotions have a moral quality (e.g. Hume) implies motivated participation. some philosophers have gone so far as to call the passions voluntary (e.g. Sartre).

.. emotions show signs of being goal-directed processes that are ultimately selected by their consequences, not just their antecedents. they are at least partially in the realm of motivated behaviors, not conditioned responses; they are pulled by incentives rather than pushed by stimuli.

[consequently] we strip reward of its connotations of pleasure, and leave it with a basic functional definition: "that which increases the likelihood that the processes it follows will recur"



Making Rules

3 types of self-committing tactics -
external checks
distractions / or repression (Freudian)
emotional control


[nonhumans also exhibit this behavior]
rats will press a bar committing them to 0.5 sec of shock 40 seconds later instead of 5 seconds of shock 45 seconds later, rather than leave the choice open and subsequently fail (almost always) to choose 0.5 seconds of imminent shock over 5 seconds of shock 5 seconds later

define (incontinence): doing something against your better judgement

Aristotle said that incontinence (akrasia) is the result of choosing according to particulars rather than universals (therefore "breakdown of will" can be avoided by approaching individual choices as referrable to larger principles) i.e. little bit like categorical imperative?

victorian psychologist Sully - will consists of uniting particular actions... under a common rule so that they are viewed as members of a class of actions subserving one comprehensive end

if a larger,later (LL) reward predicts (serves to bring about) more LL rewards in the future, it is valued more than it would be by itself, and this collection of LL rewards can sometimes stave off the power of the discounted value of the most imminent smaller, sooner reward.

[from human perceptiveness arises the influence that] one's choice now is the best current predictor of what future choices will be, and one can bundle these expectations together by that perception

personal rules are a recursive mechanism; they continually take their own pulse, and if they feel it falter, that very fact will cause further faltering

the recursive process of staking the credibility of a resolution on each occasion when it is tested gives your resolve momentum over successive times. (?)


the ongoing temptation to risk a damaging precedent - and the ever-present anxiety that this may happen - is probably what makes this strategy of self-control feel effortful. it separates intentions from mere expectations, and force of will from mere force of habit.

intertemporal cooperation is most threatened by rationalizations that permit exceptions for the choice at hand, and is most stabilized by finding bright lines to serve as criteria for what constitutes cooperation (no beers rather than just two beers) duh

tacit bargaining that is hypothesized as the basis of will may appear in a number of guises e.g. beliefs in the factuality of propositions that are actually personal rules, guises that by chance or design conceal the active nature of our participation

[the only faculty you need in order to recruit the extra motivation that forms willpower is an awareness that your current decisions predict the pattern of your future decisions ?]

a person is offered a large sum of money just to intend to drink an overwhelmingly noxious but harmless toxin. once she sincerely intends it as verified by a brain scan, she can collect the money and not actually drink the toxin. does the person have any motive to actually drink the toxin once she has the money, or, foreseeing a lack of such motive, can she sincerely intend to drink it in the first place, even if she would drink it if that were still necessary to get the money

Kavka's problem : are the properties of intention such that a person can move it about effortlessly from moment to moment, the way she raises and lowers an arm, and if not, what factors constrain changes of intention? Wholly unconstrained changes would make intention seem no different from momentary preference. The problem makes it clear that intention must include a forecast of whether one will carry it out; but this would seem to make it impossible to intend to drink the toxin, since mere forecasting leaves the intention powerless against a sudden change of incentive, even one that is entirely predictable.

in that case, Ulysses couldn't intend to sail past the Sirens unaided, and Kavka's subject couldn't intend to drink the toxin, because they couldn't expect to fulfill their intentions



one answer is offered by intertemporal bargaining, e.g. the person stakes the prospective value of a series of similar acts precedented on the initial decision, on performing this initial action. thus, the person could meaningfully intend to drink the toxin, but only because she couldn't subsequently change her mind with impunity

in this model, failure to carry out this intention injures the (internal?) credibility of intending, and hence the size of tasks that can be subsequently intended.

how a person perceives this bargaining situation is the very thing that determines how consistently she acts


The ultimate breakdown of will
nothing fails like success

Side effects-
in a dangerous split of awareness we tend to see willpower as an unmixed blessing that bears no relation to such abnormal symptoms as loss of emotional immediacy, abandonment of control in particular areas of behavior, blindness toward one's own motives, or decreased responsiveness to subtle rewards.

to save your expectation of controlling yourself generally [after a lapse which might otherwise suggest a recursively degrading weak will], you're strongly motivated to exclude from your larger rule the kind of choice where your will failed. your discrimination of this special situation has a perverse effect, because within its bounds you see only failure predicting further failure.

[regions of powerlessness are the price paid for salvaging the apprency of your general will]

how can self-enforcing intertemporal cooperation ever become a prison (e.g. punitive superego?)
one explanation is that everyday life contains many possible prisoners dilemmas in any given situation. thus the way of grouping choices that finally inspires intertemporal cooperation need not be the most productive.
when some personal rules are based on well-marked criteria, and criteria for more rewarding alternatives are harder to specify, the well-marked criteria win out simply because they offer more stability.
the personal rules of anorectics or misers are too strict to promise the greatest satisfaction in the long run, but their exactness makes them more enforceable than subtler rules that depend on judgment calls.

problem of premature satiation

in modalities where you can mentally reward yourself, surprise is the only commodity that can be scarce
[this is why fantasies become old, jokes get tiresome, etc.]

with emotional rewards, the only way to stop your mind from rushing ahead [to the reward] is to avoid approaches that can be too well learned. thus, the most valuable occasions will be those that are either uncertain to occur or mysterious - too complex or subtle to be fully anticipated, arguably the rationale of art

the paradox is that it is just those achievements which are most solid, which work best, and which continue to work that excite and reward us least. the price of skill is the loss of the experience of value

thus the greatest limitation of will comes from its greatest strength - its relentless systemization of experience through attention to precedents, which braces it against temporary preferences, also makes it unable to follow subtle strategies to overcome premature satiation

[because avoiding premature satiation requires a sort of manufactured ignorance precluded by the systematic rule of will. Your will establishes the best course of action and defines a goal or object, and evasion during your course towards this object undermines the will]

too great an awareness of the motivational contingencies for sex, affection, money, or applause spoils the effort, and not only because it undeceives the other people involved. beliefs about the intrinsic worth of these activities are valued beyond whatever accuracy these beliefs might have, because they promote the needed indirection.

belief in the importance of appetite-satisfying tasks - wealth, control, knowledge - leads to behaviors that rush to completion; but a tacit realization of the vulnerability of appetite motivates a search for obstacles to solutions or gambles that intermittently undo them. consciousness of the second task spoils the very belief in the first task that makes the first task strict enough to be an optimal pacer of reward. thus, the task of restoring appetite tends to be learned indirectly, and to be culturally transmitted via beliefs that seem superstitious or otherwise irrational to conventional utility analysis.

[women try their luck. men risk theirs]