Introducing cogiatics (short)

In short, by cogiatics I mean: The study of how the thoughts we think evolve. What’s a thought? Most of what goes on in your consciousness that is not perceptual experience is a thought. Inner monologues, sudden revelations, visualizations, having a song stuck in your head, etc.

George Price here sums up the case that natural selection is a far larger principle than the merely biological:

Price mentions one psychological example- behavioral shaping through conditioning. In addition, the selection/evolution of ideas within a society has been studied under the heading of memetics.

I want to introduce another form of psychological selection. I’m interested in the evolution of thoughts within an individual. I call this cogiatics. There are two key differences between memetics and what I call cogiatics:

1. Memes are primarily about beliefs I am interested in thoughts (to have the thought occur that X is not to believe X). Some of what I say also applies to beliefs, but not all.

2. I am interested in the internal dynamics, rather than the interpersonal/social dynamics of thoughts. How they evolve and are selected within an individual. Because we are social animals, this will naturally be entwined with social dynamics, but cannot be reduced to it.

So what determines the occurrence of thoughts within an individual? More specifically, what determines the selection of thoughts- what makes us entertain certain thoughts and clusters of related thoughts, and think them again and again? In general, thoughts flourish by grabbing our attention. When thoughts grab our attention we elaborate on them, create variations on them (offspring thoughts) and turn them over in our minds. Here are some factors that seem to me to determine whether thoughts are attended to, and thus ‘selected’:

1. The degree to which thoughts are fascinating or engaging. I realize some truth about maths, and it grabs my attention because it’s pretty.

2. The extent to which thoughts match our current emotional valence and the emotional valence we are trying to regulate ourselves towards. I am happy/depressed so I keep reproducing happy/depressed thoughts.

3. The emotional vividity- positive or negative- of the thoughts. Regardless of the mood I’m in, I realize something devastating, frightening or wonderful and it grabs all of my attention.

4. The extent to which thoughts are useful or perceived to be useful. In some cases, this may relate to whether there is evidence for thoughts.

5. The extent to which thoughts are fecund in the sense of having many possible thought-offspring, especially those that share these traits. Some thoughts are just very easy to elaborate on and create variants of.

6. The relationship between thoughts and currently prominent needs or wants (e.g., when you are horny you will think certain types of thoughts, when you are hungry you will think of food)

7. Content-specific factors: Evolutionary biases, social conditioning, habits etc.

8. Thoughts continuously foisted on us by our environment will reoccur- a trivial example, the words of a song.

Studying how thoughts evolve is underdone for two reasons:

1. Studying thoughts in the sense I propose probably requires getting participants to introspect and report. In the early 1900s, there was a movement in psychology against introspection, which was seen as unscientific. While this introspection ban had many positive aspects, it went too far.

2. Natural selection outside biology is, in general, under-theorised.

I propose we fix this by launching ourselves into cogiatics.