A choice

At reference 1 I talked about choice models and as it happened I made the sort of choice that one might want to model last night.

We had watched the second half of episode 11 of our collected Morse (TV version), with the first half having been watched before we went off on our short break to Ely. ‘The Secret of Bay 5b’, a story built around the murder of a rather unpleasant, if successful, architect, an architect with an eye for the ladies. A story of love, with a sub-story of money thrown in for good measure.

After watching it, probably for the fourth or fifth time, I was still not sure about some of the details, with BH not being much help as she had nodded off during some of the action too. So I turned to our collected Morse (print version) to see if this was one of the real episodes, based on a real book that is, rather than spun out of episodes that were, a book from which I could get the story straight, at least the story as originally written. However, among the books, the best I could do was ‘The Secret of Annexe 3’, which while different, did sound suspiciously similar. I took a quick look inside, but failed to find any points of contact with the episode 11 which we had just seen.

Second stop, the cover of the DVD, which said that this episode was based on a story by Colin Dexter.

Third stop, google, where IMDb talks of an idea – rather than a story – by Colin Dexter worked up by Alma Cullen.

At the fourth stop, a Morse buff site, I read that: ‘The phone call which Rosemary receives at the beginning of the episode, in which she is told she is a 'selfless, thankless b****h', seems to be taken from a letter (with almost identical text) received by Margaret Bowman in Colin Dexter's The Secret of Annexe 3. This is itself a story concerning an adulterous wife, a blackmailing lover and a dead husband (the 'Secret of' tag is perhaps also more than just a coincidence)’.

Then at the last stop, another Morse buff site, I read that ‘The Secret of Annexe 3’ was the only one of Dexter’s full length Morse stories which was not adapted for television. Various theories were offered as to why this might be the case.

Which gives us the model illustrated above.

At this point a clear decision popped into consciousness: the TV adaptation is indeed based on the book. There had been no conscious analysis of the model, the decision was just there, but reasoning after the event I was happy that the similarity of names is a good strong reason for, while none of the evidence against competes at that level.

So while the material had indeed passed through consciousness, the final decision was more or less made by the unconscious. But a final decision which I now own and which I will defend against all-comers, probably well beyond the point of reason, should subsequent evidence go against me. However, so far, reviewing the matter this morning, I see no reason to change the decision. And still no need to analyse what exactly I had meant by the TV adaptation being based on the book – despite it being a point which a challenger might pick up on.

Not that that is the point: the point is the hypothesis that the brain, consciously or otherwise, uses something like such a choice model in coming to its decision. That point is not disturbed by the probability that the brain will often build a bad model, using bad data, and come to the wrong choice. But hopefully it will get it right often enough for it and the species to thrive.

I associate to the world of work, where I often made decisions in what I remember as much the same sort of way. One would chew over the evidence, largely in one’s mind, and then the answer, the choice or the decision would pop into consciousness. One could then work up that decision on paper for onward transmission. Maybe not the best way to take decisions, but one which often worked well enough for all the many low-level decisions which one did not want to bother higher authority with.

I did turn up one oddity along the way. Cullen, while named and given a lot of first division television credits on IMDb, has a very feeble google footprint, but one which did include a short piece about her on the web-site of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. One can only suppose that she values her privacy – which prompts one to wonder whether the name is her real name, with a pen-name being a simple but effective precaution against intruders. On the other hand, would you go to the bother of web-suppression for a pen-name? And the best that google image search could do, when fed the image supplied by the museum, was tell me the name, which I already knew. The similar images it came up with were not any help at all. I did rather better at reference 3.

PS: also along the way, I used a number of what I called outside aids at reference 2: the DVD case, the collected edition (print version) and google, which together yielded information which was probably not otherwise available to the subconscious - which brought other skills to the party. I did not go as far as pencil and paper.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-choice-model.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/consciousness-of-choice.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/derain.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/inspector-morsoleum.html.