Tapping into human instinct for the age of intelligence. 

Style Inference Labs is founded on a paradox of the age of AI. Though intelligence helped our quest for happiness as a human species when it partially liberated us from our instinct - which was repetitive, tunnel vision, unable to look beyond the immediate - happiness can only be instinctively felt, not thought. You can’t convince someone to be happy: this type of motivation, instinctive and therefore unresponsive to reasoning, has to come on its own. Intelligence alone cannot bring happiness and it needs its old foe, instinct, to collaborate.

Intelligence is oriented toward the future whereas instinct is rooted in the past. This gap between a person’s past and future experiences is important to evaluate. There is often a delay between the time we consciously realize the importance of an activity and the time we can unconsciously (without conscious effort) enjoy it. Why is it that we can’t just accelerate this cognitive process and muster up new motivation? Why can’t a new habit, clearly essential to our well-being, come natural to us at our instant will? Why can’t we simply convince ourselves that something new in our life is worth pursuing? We need answers to these questions related to our psychology as human beings because society is rapidly changing and an innovative future in which we can’t feel happy is not worth building.

The theoretical framework we propose to answer these questions is called style inference, a hybrid term descending from two distinct traditions: psychoanalysis and the philosophy of scientific inference. The two simple ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis which we believe the philosophy of scientific inference can help us safely operationalize are:

1. Human beings come with a finite quantity of attention and attachment, which Freud called the libido and which can be invested and re-invested in various places.

2. Desires which come naturally to us as well as those that don’t are only so because they are investments into a pre-existing psychological space or structure - which Freud called the Unconscious - with its own set of affordances and constraints unique to each person.

Why imagine such a space or structure to explain human desire? “I desire x because of qualities it has and which are visible to me,” goes the legitimate reply to Freud’s belief that his Unconscious, though invisible, exists and influences behavior. It is such disagreements that warrant a dialogue between psychoanalysts and historians or philosophers of science who understand the conditions in which it has been justified or even necessary to move beyond the observable world to accurately explain a natural or social phenomenon.

If this rapprochement between schools of thought can help refine Freud’s insight without betraying it and produce tangible results in improving mental health, then the theoretical implications and practical benefits of promoting it are important. If people can understand how their own desires are structured in any given context, they can better navigate a changing and dynamic environment which sometimes places before them potential objects of desire which their psyche technically cannot ‘afford’ to invest in. Instead of blaming themselves or others, people equipped with style inference would seek to understand why their desire didn’t emerge at any given moment, and which conditions permit it.

Ultimately, psychoanalysts insist the structure of desire, though rigid, can change: through a long-term quest of understanding, we can deeply learn that some of our desires are no longer viable, which compels our instinct to re-organize itself on its own, release the quantity of attention and attachment it placed on one object, and re-invest it elsewhere. This capacity to intelligently cultivate our own desires - without being able to control what new desires will grow out of our understanding - appears crucial to our individual and collective human future because it helps us invent a future still wired to our past and therefore still enjoyable.