By mental agent or demon I mean a part of the mind capable of acting, that is, interacting with other parts of the mind in order to satisfy needs of the organism. The conscious self is the only conscious mental agent; all others are unconscious.
Mental agents directly or indirectly influence the behavior of the individual by being able to elicit particular feelings, thoughts and motivations in response to particular stimuli.
Mental agents are as immaterial as the mind that contains them and, as such, are neither visible nor measurable, but only conceivable. I, in fact, assume the existence of mental agents since, without conceptual recourse to them, I could not explain the activity and functioning of the mind.
The mental agents I hypothesize correspond to the processes described as follows by Marvin Minsky.
“The human brain is a vast organized society, composed of many different parts. Inside the human skull are crammed hundreds of different kinds of motors and organizations, wonderful systems that have evolved and accumulated over hundreds of millions of years. Some of these systems, for example the parts of the brain that make us breathe, function almost independently. But in most cases these parts of the mind have to coexist with the others, in a relationship that is sometimes one of cooperation, but more often one of conflict. It follows that our decisions and actions almost never have simple and unambiguous explanations, but are usually the result of the activities of large societies of processes in a continuous relationship of challenge, conflict or mutual exploitation. The great possibilities of intelligence arise from this enormous diversity, and not from a few simple principles.”
I view mental agents as subsystems of the general cybernetic system that is mind. We cannot explore and analyze the mind by means of technological tools, but we can hypothesize its structure and functioning by doing reverse engineering(from the English reverse engineering), that is, by observing the external behavior of the organism, this being determined by the processes occurring in the mind itself.
It is impossible to determine how many mental agents make up the mind; we can only speculate. I hypothesize, for example, that there is at least one mental agent for every need of the organism. In such a hypothesis, given the conflict between certain needs (as discussed in the chapter Conflicts and Synergies between Needs – Origin of Mental Disorders), I assume that mental agents may interact cooperatively or competitively.
Another hypothesis of mine is that there is a mental agent for each significant person the subject has met and with whom he or she has established a positive or negative affective relationship. In that case we speak of an internalized person.
In fact, I assume that within us there are, in symbolic form, all the important people we have interacted with throughout our lives, and the imaginary ones we would like to meet and interact with.
Referring back to classical culture, we can call demons both mental agents who preside over needs and those who represent known people. The term demon is not to be understood as a devil but as a psychodynamic entity capable of arousing feelings and motivations in the person who hosts it.
These are not metaphysical entities but bio-logical, that is, mental agents emerging from the activities of our neurons. Each of these demons suggests, demands, promises or threatens us with something. Some urge us to go in certain directions, others in others, and we must decide whom to obey and whom to disobey, whom to follow and whom to ignore.
The significant people we have internalized are more important than the real ones because they are always active within us and guide us even when the corresponding real people no longer exist or are different from the internalized ones.
The demon in computer science and philosophy
In computer science, a demon( daemon) is a program that runs in the background, that is, continuously simultaneously with the execution of application processes. The tasks and activities of a daemon can be the most diverse and relate to the general operation of the computer (operating system) or particular applications ready to go into action at any time. Several demons can be active simultaneously.
In Greek philosophy and various religions the demon is a supernatural figure. In general, it is a being who stands halfway between what is divine and what is human, serving as an intermediary between these two dimensions. Depending on the authors and particular philosophies, religions and cultures, the demon may be more or less evil.
For Heraclitus, the demon corresponds to man’s character or temperament, which determines his fate.
For Socrates the demon is a divine guide, that is, a moral conscience that assists him in every decision, not so much to induce him to do certain things as to deter him from doing them if they procure evil.
For Senocrates, demons can be both good and evil and correspond to the gods in struggle with each other, thus transferring the conflict between good and evil to earth, to humans.
For Alexander of Aphrodisias, the demon of each individual is his or her own nature.
Because of the above, I consider it appropriate to use the term demon as a synonym for mental agent.
Mental agents as cybernetic subsystems that preside over needs
I consider the ‘mental agent (or demon) to be the personification of a need, that is, its guardian, in the sense that it is concerned with obtaining its satisfaction and avoiding its frustration. This occurs independently of the activity of the conscious self, that is, unconsciously, automatically and involuntarily.
Every mental agent consists of software, that is, logic that determines its behavior. In other words, each mental agent behaves according to a program (or algorithm) that determines the exchange of information with other mental agents based on the information received.
We can assume the existence of hierarchies of mental agents, that is, agents that use the services offered to them by subordinate agents. We can also assume that one mental agent is able to activate or deactivate others.
The individual’s motivations and behaviors are, in my opinion, the results of the joint will of all his mental agents, keeping in mind that each of them has a greater or lesser weight, which varies from person to person. Consequently, in the case of conflicts between demons, it may happen that the individual limits his behavior by giving up a number of options, or paralyzes himself altogether, as discussed in the chapter Conflicts and Synergies between Needs – Origin of Mental Disorders.
The concept of the mental agent or demon is important in scaling back the importance of the conscious self, which is neither the master nor the director of the mind (although it deludes itself into thinking it is), but an agent like others, with the difference that it is endowed with awareness, albeit very limited.
In other words, the conscious self also has its own software that responds algorithmically to information coming to it from other mental agents in the form of cognitive perceptions, feelings and motivations. In this sense, the conscious self is not free (or is free within very narrow limits), as discussed in the chapter on Free Will.
Next chapter: Cognitive-emotional map.