Key Definitions from This Article:

Mind's Projection Fallacy

(Edward T. Jaynes)

(A) (My imagination) → (The actual property of nature)
(B) (My ignorance) → (Nature is undefined)

Sense of Pleasure

(Yan Lyutnev)

A first-person, trackable sharp increase in pleasant sensation (a hormone release)

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On this particular day, I hadn’t slept well and was experiencing an unpleasant, suboptimal sensation in my head due to sleep deprivation. When I’ve had enough sleep, this feeling is absent. I was standing at the self-checkout in the supermarket and thought: "This checkout machine is totally non-pleasurable, but surely someone put a lot of effort into making it, and someone must find it pleasurable. When I compare it to the fact that someone finds it pleasurable, it gives a kind of surprise, a dissonance, and what’s called an 'insight.' Right now, I’m blocking myself from calling objects 'non-pleasurable,' but the state of sleep deprivation made me more stressed about controlling my phrasing, and old cognitive algorithms resurfaced.

My current explanation of the mechanism behind calling the machine 'non-pleasurable' is: from the inside, it seems like the machine has a certain property that can be verbalized as 'non-pleasurable.' It seems constant, but if that’s the case, it also seems like others will notice this property too. After all, when you check if it’s true or not, you look at your own feelings—and I was sleep-deprived, and my limbic system wasn’t giving any anticipation for interacting with the checkout machine.

If the checkout machine is a barrier between you and the end of the unpleasant payment process (which, on another day, might be pleasant), the categorization 'machine' can get associated with the categorization 'non-pleasurable.' Categorizing things has consequences, in that the brain saves and compresses all internal categories into something that seems constant and similar.

This apparent property of the machine, 'non-pleasurable,' can be remembered, and people do this for many things. Physiological memories of such properties are efficient for many tasks: if, instead of the machine, there was an instrument or strategy that was suboptimal in terms of 'limbic system comfort for future interaction,' and the brain later sought to avoid low stimulation (with hormone influxes that feel pleasant), the brain would recall that sensation, that deferred property.

Verbalized with words like 'non-pleasurable,' 'boring,' 'dull,' if you need to quickly choose which tool to use for a task, the checkout machine won’t pass the test based on the compressed sensation—it’s remembered as unpleasant, and the brain will pick a more pleasant alternative from the options—for example, paying with a bank card at home with delivery, when you’re lying on the couch. This is because, in the past, when you were lying on your bed and looking at your phone, the brain remembers the high stimulation, whereas the ATM doesn’t trigger that.

But the variable that usually influences decisions is the memory of high stimulation in the limbic system. Let’s change it in the example above and compare expectations:

If you’re lying in bed in a quiet room, it’s comfortable, but we’ve reduced the 'high stimulation' variable to nearly zero (no sounds in the room, no internet on your phone, you only have the delivery app open, and nothing else). Just before ordering, you didn’t scroll through a feed, you didn’t get any pleasant hormones—this time, the situation may be the opposite. Then, your lyrical hero is more likely to call the bed 'non-pleasurable,' or even the apartment itself, while in the supermarket, there will be music, noise, and people, which will stimulate the brain, providing a higher influx of hormones than in the bed without the internet.

This 'property of the machine,' whether it’s pleasurable or not (I call it the 'property of the machine' here in quotation marks, hinting that this property isn’t of the machine itself but of your perception of it, and the word 'property' here refers to a seeming constancy in perception in the moment), depends on physiology, such as whether you slept well or not, or if you ate a lot of sugar.

It also depends on the goal—if you were solving a task and the answer was to use the checkout machine, or even to make the checkout machine, but for this you’d receive a large reward (salary, if you’re working as a maker of checkout machines), then if the process was sufficiently non-burdensome and the goal was achieved, and the method of goal closure was the machine, then the machine might end up with the internal property 'pleasurable.'

If you don’t like the consequences of such a system of reasoning, where feelings are attached to the machine, my current cheap replacement, which eliminates this, is to call the feeling 'pleasurable' or not 'pleasurable,' not the machine.

Feelings are changeable depending on your bodily state, which changes every day from various factors that you can control. For which tasks do you want to keep the constant property for the checkout machine, tied to unpleasant sensations, spoiling the prediction that the unpleasant sensation will repeat? It may repeat, or it may not.

And here another feature of modern language from society comes up—people often make maintaining these constant properties a goal, and prioritize it. Especially if they’ve previously declared to society that 'this is who I am.'

"Do you know, I’m the type of person who finds checkout machines non-pleasurable, those who think otherwise are fools, here’s the set of facts that confirm this property, which of course belongs to the machine and not to my sensations. I promised myself in the past to keep it unchanged for the rest of my life, and if I notice that the feeling hasn’t changed, I’ll revert it, because I got confused about internal properties and tied them to my identity."

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Where Predictions Fail

What are the costs of damaging predictions when you leave the habit in your brain of operating with constant properties of the 'pleasurable machine'?

If the 'pleasurable' property was stored at a time when you hadn’t slept well and your mind was in a suboptimal state, wanting to conserve energy, the interaction with the machine was unpleasant, and you may send into the future the expectation that this experience will repeat, and you might default to not wanting to return to this state, not wanting to return to the vending machine because the limbic system will expect a return to the same unpleasant state.

But if, by chance, you became a fitness enthusiast, started running a lot, your adaptability improved, you always slept well, and you didn’t sit on your phone for an hour, the interaction with the vending machine in these new conditions might be very pleasurable, which would be verbalized as 'pleasurable' from within. I’ve been in such situations several times, and after that, I wrote posts on my public page about how much I enjoyed something I thought was boring and exhausting, and how I wanted to share it with everyone. Now I see this as a result of mind's projection fallacy, where my surprise was explained by a tendency to generalize the past sensation from the gym as a permanent property of the 'gym' tool, verbalized as boring and exhausting.

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What I Suggest in Return

How can you change your system of reasoning so that you no longer fall into such surprises about the new property of the gym or the vending machine, and predict sensations more accurately in the future?

— Change your system of reasoning to: This is not a 'non-pleasurable' vending machine, but I had an unpleasant sensation at that moment when I interacted with the machine.

— Not 'the gym is boring and exhausting,' but 'when I was last at the gym, I experienced low stimulation and physical exhaustion.'

This system of reasoning doesn’t tie the false property of 'boring and exhausting' to the gym, nor the false property of the machine as 'non-pleasurable.'

This system ties the memory of the unpleasant sensation inside the gym and the unpleasant sensation when you were standing by the checkout machine, but this sensation doesn’t directly attach to the machine—it exists next to the machine and next to the gym. Now the intuition that the gym is tied to exhaustion will be broken because they are independent by default.

They might be causally dependent, in that exhaustion after the gym can be explained by a high amount of physical activity, but by tying 'exhaustion' to the gym category, you tied it to the environment, but the environment itself is not the direct cause of your tiredness, because you could have gone to the gym and done nothing but drink soda—the limbic system would be satisfied in this case, and it probably wouldn’t even assign the false property of exhaustion to the gym.

If I allow myself to attach the property of 'exhaustion' in my current reasoning system, I would attach it to the high physical activity level, but not to the gym. Because I expect that a high physical load will always be tied to an increase in exhaustion, but being in the gym won’t always be tied to that.

But the brain can tie it into an apparent causality, when after shifting attention to the 'gym' category in the old system of reasoning, you expect exhaustion, and here your predictions fail when your health changes, when you sleep well, when you reduce physical activity, and when your body’s adaptability increases. The above parameters are causes of fatigue under certain conditions, but you can usually find cases where they won’t influence the fatigue variable. Just like with the gym.

Categorization has consequences in that the category for cognitive efficiency ties to another category at the cost of degraded predictions and insensitivity to the goal.

If your goal is literally to go to the gym and you will get a lot of money for it, at that very moment, the gym may start to feel "pleasant" in an unusual way. In regular Russian or English, it's not common to give characteristics to our emotions; rather, we attribute characteristics to what we experienced the emotion in relation to. This is the cognitive economy, and it creates a snowball effect of cognitive distortions, as I described earlier.

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And since people procrastinate when it comes to spending additional cognitive resources on training a new system of reasoning, because it requires effort to create new neural connections through discomfort, and also because if they get used to talking like this, they will feel cringey, I expect people won’t want to adopt a new system of reasoning by default. This is why we see an abundance of phrases like "the gym is boring and hard" in modern mass culture.