In my previous post, I suggested that akrasia involves subagent disagreement - or in other words, different parts of the brain having differing ideas on what the best course of action is. The existence of such conflicts raises the question, how does one resolve them?

In this post I will discuss various techniques which could be interpreted as ways of resolving subagents disagreements, as well as some of the reasons for why this doesn’t always happen.

A word on interpreting “subagents”

The frame that I’ve had so far is that of the brain being composed of different subagents with conflicting beliefs. On the other hand, one could argue that the subagent interpretation isn’t strictly necessary for many of the examples that I bring up in this post. One could just as well view my examples as talking about a single agent with conflicting beliefs.

The distinction between these two frames isn’t always entirely clear. In “Complex Behavior from Simple (Sub)Agents”, mordinamael presents a toy model where an agent has different goals. Moving to different locations will satisfy the different goals to a varying extent. The agent will generate a list of possible moves and picks the move which will bring some goal the closest to being satisfied.

Is this a unified agent, or one made up of several subagents?

One could argue for either interpretation. On the other hand, mordinamael's post frames the goals as subagents, and they are in a sense competing with each other. On the other hand, the subagents arguably don’t make the final decision themselves: they just report expected outcomes, and then a central mechanism picks a move based on their reports.

This resembles the neuroscience model I discussed in my last post, where different subsystems in the brain submit various action “bids” to the basal ganglia. Various mechanisms then pick a winning bid based on various criteria - such as how relevant the subsystem’s concerns are for the current situation, and how accurate the different subsystems have historically been in their predictions.

Likewise, in extending the model from Consciousness and the Brain for my toy version of the Internal Family Systems model, I postulated a system where various subagents vote for different objects to become the content of consciousness. In that model, the winner was determined by a system which adjusted the vote weights of the different subagents ...