Two Minds
A concept I find very useful from Chinese philosophy is the difference between the Wisdom Mind and the Emotional Mind.
The Wisdom Mind is called your Yì 意, which pronounced like “eat” without the “t”.
The Emotional Mind is called your Xin 心, which is pronounced like “sheen”.
The Wisdom Mind is the part of the mind that you use for critical thinking and reasoning. It is the methodical part of your mind that thinks about what you are doing and why.
The Emotional Mind on the other hand is quicker and has more to do with the way you are feeling.
When you experience something through your senses, it reaches your Emotional Mind first, and the Emotional Mind can react to it almost instantaneously. It’s like when you slip and loose your footing and your arms start to wave in order to try and regain your balance. Your Emotional Mind reacted automatically to try and keep you from falling over.
Your Wisdom mind will react after the Emotional Mind, and will be able to think about why you almost slipped and how to prevent it from happening again.
The two parts of our mind work together.
The Command of the Wisdom Mind
An important part of the Wisdom Mind is that it has the ultimate authority, the “veto” power, over the Emotional Mind. In other words, it is the commander.
Old Chinese texts say the Wisdom mind is like a Marshal leading an army. This is a good analogy.
The Marshal decides what the army needs to do, and what strategy they will use to get it done, but it is the army’s job to actually do it.
The Emotional Mind can feel a certain way or have some natural reaction, but it’s also possible for the Wisdom Mind to override that, and to take command of it.
Very often this is a necessary thing. Our Emotional Mind, just like the army, doesn’t understand the full context of the situation. It just has its immediate feelings and reactions. It needs the Wisdom Mind to take control and direct it towards the ultimate goal.
The Speed & Efficiency of the Emotional Mind
Just like the Marshal needs the army, the Wisdom Mind needs the Emotional Mind, particularly because he cannot personally handle every little detail out in the field. There’s just too much to be done.
Our bodies have so many millions of little cells and nerves and muscles that need to be managed, and it’s our body’s Emotional Mind that takes in all of that information and makes all of those things move and act.
If our Wisdom mind had to deal with all of those individual details itself we’d never have time to think about anything else!
The Emotional Mind has the advantage of numbers. Our highly-distributed Emotional Mind, similar to an army, can be trained by our Wisdom Mind to carry out millions of minute tasks, all at the same time.
The CPU & the GPU
It’s interesting to realize that this is very similar to the way our modern computers have both a CPU and a GPU.
GPUs are like our Emotional Mind, they can carry out thousands of tasks all at the same time, as long as these tasks can be done somewhat independently from each-other.
But we still need CPUs, like our Wisdom Mind, to control the whole process, to train the GPU and tell it what to do, and to make decisions based on the current context and the overall plan.
The Importance of Balance
Having two “minds”, it’s sometimes possible for us to choose which one we use more for a particular task, and it can make a big difference which one use use.
The Emotional Mind excels at tasks related to physical dexterity. Take, for example, playing a sport like Ping-Pong. By practicing and training your Emotional Mind, you can get very good at responding quickly to many situations, even before you have thought or realized why you responded a certain way.
I find that when I’m playing I very often put too much focus on using my Wisdom Mind and I end up over-thinking things and making it more difficult than necessary. There are a lot of situations where we allow our anxiety or frustration to cause our Wisdom Mind to “interrupt” our thought process more than necessary and impair our performance. This can apply to games or other life situations, too.
Sometimes we overlook the importance of relaxing and just taking things as they come. Relaxing and allowing our Emotional Mind to “soak up” what’s happening can often give us a clearer, more complete picture of what’s going on around us when over-thinking with our Wisdom Mind can cause tunnel vision.
At the same time, over-depending on your Emotional Mind risks losing out on reason and strategy, or giving in to your reactions when they are not appropriate to the situation.
It’s important to use our Wisdom mind to find the appropriate balanced use of both of our minds.
AI - Missing a Mind
When thinking about the difference between the Emotional and Wisdom Minds, I think it helps shed some light one thing that our LLM based AIs are missing: they don’t have a Wisdom Mind. I’m not saying this is necessarily the only thing that our AI models are missing, but it definitely seems like an important one.
LLMs are made out of the millions of little “neurons” all kind of “feeling” out what kind of a response to give to prompts, and they can respond very quickly to prompts across a wide array of information, but there’s no Wisdom Mind to make sure that it makes any sense in the end. It’s almost like talking directly to an Emotional Mind.
Physically our brains might also be made up of a bunch of little neurons all doing their own thing, but God arranged those neurons in some very powerful way to actually give us a Wisdom Mind that can do solid, logical reasoning about things and not just be swayed by the probabilistic feelings of our Emotional Mind.
I’m not sure how to make one of those artificially, and I’m not sure if we’ll figure it out or not, but currently that capacity for reliable reasoning is clearly missing.
Summary
I think that the differentiation between these two “minds” can be a useful tool to help us think about how we think. It has helped me get better at focusing in competitive games, which is something I can have trouble doing “properly” ( well enough to win 😄 ).
It’s cool to learn about how you think, and maybe this framing will be handy to you somehow.
Bye for now. 👋