Emotions Are Concepts

Quoting StreetlightX

At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process?

As is obvious, all emotions are reactions, reactions to something i.e. emotions, to the extent that I'm aware, are always caused. It's my belief that certain reactions should occur with a minimum of delay to prevent catastrophic consequences. The well-known flight or fight response will vouch for that in the clearest way possible. Evolution, if true, would ensure that these life-critical reactions get our immediate and undivided attention and how better to do that then with emotions. Emotions, as Feldman Barrett claims, are assuredly based on some rational evaluation but what was/is being evaluated is a matter of life and death and thus evolution short-circuited the process, shifting the burden of, what is ultimately, survival from the time-consuming prefrontal cortex (rational) to the fast-acting limbic system (emotional).

There is definitely more that can be said.

Quoting TheMadFool

As is obvious, all emotions are reactions, reactions to something i.e. emotions, to the extent that I'm aware, are always caused.

On the account given here, this is exactly the wrong way to look at things. Or at least, it is only half the story. As a matter of conceptual evaluation, emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but involve a degree of intentionality which cannot be reduced to causality. This is why emotions are a skill - a matter of learning. To quote Barrett again on this exact topic: "Core affect [what I referred to above as 'generic affect'] is caused—it represents the state of the person in relation to the immediate environment (in philosophical terms, this is its intension), but “cause” and “aboutness” are not equivalent. [However], when we identify our core affect as being about something, it becomes intentional, and the experience of emotion begins."

Part of what is at stake here is calling into question any simplified - much too simplified - distinction between 'emotions vs rationality'. There is a rationality specific to emotions, in strong sense that emotions are not simply 'caused' but also partake of an inferential economy. Worth quoting another paper of hers two, especially with respect to your recent interest in brains:

"As an animal’s integrated physiological state changes constantly throughout the day, its immediate past determines the aspects of the sensory world that concern the animal in the present, which in turn influences what its niche will contain in the immediate future. This observation prompts an important insight: neurons do not lie dormant until stimulated by the outside world, denoted as stimulus->response. Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli. The implications of these insights are profound: namely, it is very unlikely that perception, cognition, and emotion are localized in dedicated brain systems, with perception triggering emotions that battle with cognition to control behavior. This means classical accounts of emotion, which rely on this S->R narrative, are highly doubtful" (Barrett, "The Theory of Constructed Emotion", my bolding).

Quoting StreetlightX

"As an animal’s integrated physiological state changes constantly throughout the day, its immediate past determines the aspects of the sensory world that concern the animal in the present, which in turn influences what its niche will contain in the immediate future. This observation prompts an important insight: neurons do not lie dormant until stimulated by the outside world, denoted as stimulus->response. Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli. The implications of these insights are profound: namely, it is very unlikely that perception, cognition, and emotion are localized in dedicated brain systems, with perception triggering emotions that battle with cognition to control behavior. This means classical accounts of emotion, which rely on this S->R narrative, are highly doubtful" (Barrett, "The Theory of Constructed Emotion", my bolding).

How early does she think that emotions are constructed? Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?

In some manner it is both classical and new views. You are sometimes overwhelmed by bio. The pallate of emotions is strict, which leads me to this conclusion. It's not that we cant have complex or abstract emotions. Our environment shapes our emotions to be mostly common emotions.

"Importantly, emotions, as differential, require that emotions are learned: they are a skill, which we learn to employ in one way or another, sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes to no effect." StreetligthX

I believe we are "programmed " with emotions , to survive and thrive . The fact that we learn how to use these emotions in different ways as we mature , even twist emotions , to get what we want , still comes down to the same thing . To Survive and thrive . Emotions is a way that the subconscious mind controls . I do not believe we actually have much "Free will" . The battle between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind in our evolution , past , present and in particular the future is a very curios thing .We create laws and punishment to punish the selfish and aggressive , the thief's and greedy . But just about all criminal actions are based on the "Human Programme" we are all Build with , there subconscious mind is merely doing what it has always done , we are very selfish when the going gets tough . Yet our conscious mind says this is wrong and we must fight it . So what is going on ? Battle of the minds , conscious vs subconscious ? Emotions being the front line . Is this were we get the concept of good and evil ? I am really interested to see what evolution has in store for us , the more we learn and understand , the more we will evolve

Quoting Colin Cooper

I believe we are "programmed " with emotions , to survive and thrive . The fact that we learn how to use these emotions in different ways as we mature , even twist emotions , to get what we want , still comes down to the same thing . To Survive and thrive . Emotions is a way that the subconscious mind controls . I do not believe we actually have much "Free will" . The battle between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind in our evolution , past , present and in particular the future is a very curios thing .We create laws and punishment to punish the selfish and aggressive , the thief's and greedy . But just about all criminal actions are based on the "Human Programme" we are all Build with , there subconscious mind is merely doing what it has always done , we are very selfish when the going gets tough . Yet our conscious mind says this is wrong and we must fight it . So what is going on ? Battle of the minds , conscious vs subconscious ? Emotions being the front line . Is this were we get the concept of good and evil ? I am really interested to see what evolution has in store for us , the more we learn and understand , the more we will evolve

This is a very good example of exactly the opposite of the account relayed in the OP.

Reply to StreetlightX Someone from this forum put me onto Feldman Barrett’s book ‘How Emotions Are Made’, for which I am most grateful.

To address your two points:

Quoting StreetlightX

(1) - Emotion is action-oriented. To be 'angry' is to have made an assessment - not entirely conscious, but not entirely non-conscious either - that anger is the appropriate/most-useful way to address a particular situation: yelling and displaying aggression might be useful as a response to a bully.

I’d like to see a quote from Feldman Barrett that directly supports your reference to emotion as ‘action-oriented’, because this description seems different to my understanding of her theory on constructed emotions. We reduce an interoception of affect into values of intensity and valence, which contribute to how we conceptualise an experience and make predictions about the world - including naming our antagoniser as ‘a bully’ and our affect as ‘anger’, which in our mind then justifies a response of yelling and displaying aggression.

Quoting StreetlightX

(2) The second interesting consequence - the one I'm most interested in here - is that emotions (qua concepts) are differential. Anger may be invoked (or evoked, rather) in a range of different situations, none of which may have anything in common. The concept - and emotion - 'anger' does not possess an 'essence' which is simply expressed univocally, but is instead a varied set of behaviours that can be 'used' for various purposes. In Barrett's words: Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualisation for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many". One should hear in this Wittgenstein's idea that what defines any one thing is simply a set of 'family resemblances'.

This one interests me as well. I have found the illustration of emotional concepts as amorphous relational structures of value differentials or ‘family resemblances’ to be relevant not just to emotions, but to many other concepts. That we construct, predict and test the majority of our concepts from infancy in relation to interoception of affect (consciously or subconsciously) also suggests the significance of perceived value and potential to our experience of reality, backed up by neuroscience.

Quoting Possibility

I’d like to see a quote from Feldman Barrett that directly supports your reference to emotion as ‘action-oriented’, because this description seems different to my understanding of her theory on constructed emotions.

Will reply more substantially in a bit (dinner time), but a quick copy and paste:

"In a sense, a situated conceptualization, because it is designed for action, provides you with a script to guide your future behavior in a specific context or situation. For example, across varied situations, different situated conceptualizations of anger will be computed. Sometimes it works to yell, sometimes to pound your fist, sometimes to cry or walk away, sometimes to hit. During a given act of conceptualizing core affect, the simulation can shape a person’s behavior in line with what has been experienced before in that sort of situation (or one very much like it). As a result, situated conceptualizations deliver highly specific inferences tailored to particular situations regarding what actions to take" (from "Solving the Paradox").

Reply to StreetlightX It seems to presume, this hypothesis, that any body state can be freely interpreted (via culture, habit, parenting...) to any of the labels. I doubt this. There are specific facial expressions and positionings, breathing patterns, postural changes, gestures associated with the different emotions. Unless what happens is non-specific bodily reaction, interpretation as Emotion X and then these specific bodily patterns are then added, I don't see why these patterns would repeat. You can wag the dog with people, as they do in Alba Emoting (a training that is used for example by actors, but also by people in other professions) to set an emotion going in a person. IOW if you put the body in a specifc pattern you will feel a specific emotion (in fact across cultures). Widen eyes, breath shallowly but rapidly, tilt the neck back and you will feel fear. (note I have taken the training but my memory is not at all perfect). And the details of the breathing, for example, get very specific, such as sharp inhales, but slower exhales and more. And mixed emotions are of course possible, where people have portions of different emotions, and this I also experienced.

And we were not told what emotions we were being 'put into'. We were simply told to change our faces bodies and breathing in the following ways.....and we saw what happened. It was very, very rare that there was any disagreement about what emotion we had. In fact I only remember it with mixed emotions. And we came from a few different countries. IOW there seem to be specific physical patterns with each of the different emotions.

So, I gotta say I don't think this hypothesis is correct.

People can, I know from being a psychologist, misinterpret their emotions, especially if the emotion (in context or in general) is ego-dystonic. Since we were working without contexts and we strongly physicalized the emotions, in ways that are less easy to do in all sorts of social contexts) we rarely had trouble identifying them. But it certainly does happen that people can think they are sad when they are angry - some women have this pattern, especially if they are in traditional subcultures. But here what happens is there is a conversion. The anger arises, it is suppressed and then in reaction to that process (which is habitual, rapid and nearly unconscious) the person feels sad. And can also get some relief from the suppression of emotion by expressing sadness. So in a sense they are not wrong, though they haven't really expressed or notice their initial emotional reaction.

That all said, I just don't buy the hypothesis yet.

Quoting Coben

There are specific facial expressions and positionings, breathing patterns, postural changes, gestures associated with the different emotions.

Nope. [PDF]

(Although the findings here surprised me too!).

Reply to StreetlightX Well, as said, it does not fit with my experience in the Alba emotion training at all. We should have been all over the place in our identification of the emotion, since there was no trigger - like someone being rude to us, or threatening us - so there were no cues as to what we were supposed to feel. The problem with the criticism in the article is it is looking at end products. Of course, given the extreme judgments of emotion in society coupled with individual patterns of suppression expression, you will not find easy to read after the fact 'signs'. But working in the other direction, wagging the dog you get consistent results. Because here you have, which you don't have in most social situations (and being alone, given our training, is still social/cultured), a more pure form of the physiological aspects of the emotion. Or in these groups we as a group won at the roulette wheel hundreds of times in a row betting on red.

Analyze your emotions until you feel nothing but despair and see how happy you are.

Emotions are mental-environmental phenomena. There are emotional states, this is what we need to focus on.

Your motion in environment, produces different amounts of energy in your mind, and you feel emotion more diversely, emotions are tracked falsely in the OP if you think happiness is just a spell, when it is rather states, that is people saying they're happy when they're not. People claiming to have full control.

However, it is activated, it's just not a spell but a state, so it is recognised in people's motion.

He is in a state of happiness right now - he is just he. It can be thought, you can conceive a feeling.

Quoting StreetlightX

As a matter of conceptual evaluation, emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but involve a degree of intentionality which cannot be reduced to causality. This is why emotions are a skill - a matter of learning.

Maybe I've misunderstood what you're getting at, but these are my thoughts from what you've presented:

The baby emerging from the womb cries, I suppose because it's a new environment. Maybe it's cold, maybe it's scary. I really don't know. I do know he wasn't taught to cry and he never learned to cry. I also think there must be a moment in everyone's life when they experience a new emotion they hadn't previously felt. There is the feeling of love, of heartbreak, of loss, of disappointment that occur in our lives as new. When were they learned? What of the emotions of physical pleasure, like those from sex, from drugs, from an adrenaline rush, none of which are learned, but which simply occur under a specific set of external stimuli?

Animals have emotion as well, so I can't think that my dog decides to be angry at the person walking by my house, but he just is. He can be taught not to act on his impulse and to actually attack the neighbor, but the emotion itself seems very reactive.

What you say is contrary also to the way we think of intentionality. The idea of the "cold blooded" killer, being the one who acts not in the heated rage of emotion, but is calm and collected and decides to murder, is the one who receives the greater punishment.

I have trouble getting beyond the idea that emotions are primary They are what motivate us to act. Without emotion, we would all just stand still, not wanting anything and having no motivation at all. In fact, emotion means literally to move (as does motive, motivate, to be moved to action, etc.). If emotions are not primary, then what is making me want to want so that I am motivated to want? How can they therefore be a skill?

Quoting schopenhauer1

How early does she think that emotions are constructed? Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?

She doesn't talk a great deal about developmental aspects in the papers I've read so far (perhaps she does more in the book - @possibility?), but she gives a very rich account of the various aspects of bodily life that play a role in the formation of emotion-concepts. I know I've done alot of quoting without putting things in my own words, but she puts it so well that I'm obliged to!:

Feldman Barrett, 'Solving:"A category of knowledge, like anger, develops as sensory, motor, and somatovisceral features are integrated across instances and settings where instances of the category are identified and anger labeled. Sensory information about the object that is in the focus of attention (e.g., visual information about the person you are interacting with, auditory information about his or her voice, as well as that person’s relation to you in this instance), somatovisceral information about your core affective state (i.e., your current homeostatic state), motor programs for interacting with that person, and for regulating your own core affective behavior, associated with unpleasant, high-arousal states (e.g., facial movements, body movements, loudness of the voice), as well as the label anger (provided by yourself or others), and so on, bind together (via conjunctive neurons) to form an instance of anger.

Said more simply, properties that are pointed out by parents (or other speakers) or those that are functionally relevant in everyday activities will bind to core affect to represent anger in that instance. As instances of anger accumulate, and information is integrated across instances, a simulator for anger develops, and conceptual knowledge about anger accrues. The resulting conceptual system is a distributed collection of modality- specific memories captured across all instances of a category. These establish the conceptual content for the basic-level category anger and can be retrieved for later simulations of anger.

So there's this rich integration across various bodily layers and throughout the whole developmental history of an organism, mixed in with socio-cultural influence (she writes alot on how language serves to individuate emotion) in a way that's both biological and extra-biological which I find incredibly appealing. The most appealing thing to me about this account - which is what I really want to talk about, TBH - is the idea that emotions can then become 'detached' from their 'core affective response' and become, in a way, autonomous:

"A simulation of anger could allow a person to go beyond the information given to fill in aspects of a core affective response that are not present at a given perceptual instance. In such a case, the simulation essentially produces an illusory correlation between response outputs". (FB)

This is akin to what the philosopher Adrain Johnson calls 'misfelt feelings' in which emotions can become in some manner misattributed or channelled in ways that go far beyond what is 'warranted' by any one particular lives situation. I have in mind all kinds of pathological phenomena like obsession, group hysteria, addition - perhaps love or lust - and so on.

Quoting Possibility

This one interests me as well. I have found the illustration of emotional concepts as amorphous relational structures of value differentials or ‘family resemblances’ to be relevant not just to emotions, but to many other concepts. That we construct, predict and test the majority of our concepts from infancy in relation to interoception of affect (consciously or subconsciously) also suggests the significance of perceived value and potential to our experience of reality, backed up by neuroscience.

I edited out my reference to Wittgenstein's 'family resemblance' to fit in a bit more about emotions as skills, but I'm glad you caught it because I did because now I can talk about it :grin:. I think one of the great strengths of Barrett's approach is that it sheds light not only on 'emotion' but on the very idea of 'concepts' as well. In this I find it highly philosophical and not merely biological or psychological. To go back to the passage that really struck me (again, I only half-apologize for all the quoting but they all help round-out the picture I'm trying to relay in a piecemeal fashion):

FB:"Knowledge for anger is established via a distributed collection of context-specific memories captured across all instances of anger. From the perspective being developed here, this means that knowledge for anger is established by capturing context-specific memories for instances when core affect has been labeled as anger (such as when the category is being learned). A given emotion label (such as anger) is used to refer to a variety of instances. Core affect can be categorized as anger on the highway (when a person might speed up, yell, or shake a fist), in a boardroom (when a person might sit quietly), or on the playground (where a child might make a scowling face, stomp, or throw a toy). In each case, the situational context (both the physical and the relational context) will, in part, determine what behaviors will be performed, such that the context is an intrinsic element of any anger episode.

...On any given occasion, the content of a situated conceptualization for anger will be constructed to contain mainly those properties of anger that are contextually relevant, and it therefore contains only a small subset of the knowledge available in long-term memory about the category anger. The situation, then, will largely determine which representation of anger will be constructed to conceptualize a state of core affect, with the result that the experience of anger (or of any emotion) will be sculpted by the situation.... The meaning of a situation to a particular person at a particular point in time is related to the emotion that is experienced."

One of the really wild things about this account (for me) is that it can almost be 'translated' point-by-point into a Wittgensteinian account of concept-use in general. The idea being that concepts need not be defined by any universally instancing attribute, as it were, but that a concept can be drawn on and modified per case, with some components being deemed relevant, and others not, while still nonetheless retaining a certain nominal unity (this is anger; that is also anger - but there is no irreducible conceptual core' to which they both refer'). How a concept 'plays out' depends very much on what it is being put to use for. One might say: the meaning of emotions are their use.

Quoting StreetlightX

The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express': one feels, viscerally, anger, which one then expresses by stomping a foot, clenching a fist, or having a yell. This is a view of emotion which has begun to be challenged by recent studies, which instead posit that emotions - or at least specific emotions, like anger, shame, happiness, and sadness - are conceptual reterojections which we attribute or impute to bodily states which are not 'in-themselves', sad, happy, angry or whathaveyou.

(To paraphrase William James somewhat: we don't stop our feet because we are angry - we are angry because we stomp our feet: although it's a bit more complex than that).

At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process? It's this latter view which I want to outline and discuss here.

The basic idea behind this second view of emotion is that emotion is two-pronged, as it were. At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations. To quote Lisa Felman Barrett - on whose work this thread is based - on this:

"Conceptual information about emotion can be thought of as “top-down” and core affect “bottom-up” constraints on the emerging experience of emotion. The idea is that conceptual and affective processing proceed in parallel, with the processing in each limiting, shaping, and constraining the way in which the brain achieves a single coherent “solution”—an instance of experienced emotion that is organized into a coherent interpretation and action plan that suits the particular goals of the individual and constraints of the context. All this occurs in the blink of an eye. The result is an emotional episode that people experience more or less as a gestalt."
— Feldman Barrett - Solving the Emotion Paradox

There are heaps of interesting consequences that follow from this, but I just want to start with discussing two: (1) - Emotion is action-oriented. To be 'angry' is to have made an assessment - not entirely conscious, but not entirely non-conscious either - that anger is the appropriate/most-useful way to address a particular situation: yelling and displaying aggression might be useful as a response to a bully.

(2) The second interesting consequence - the one I'm most interested in here - is that emotions (qua concepts) are differential. Anger may be invoked (or evoked, rather) in a range of different situations, none of which may have anything in common. The concept - and emotion - 'anger' does not possess an 'essence' which is simply expressed univocally, but is instead a varied set of behaviours that can be 'used' for various purposes. In Barrett's words: Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualisation for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many".

Importantly, emotions, as differential, require that emotions are learned: they are a skill, which we learn to employ in one way or another, sometimes well, sometimes badly, sometimes to no effect. To end with another quote: ""conceptual knowledge about emotion constitutes expertise about how to deal with your own internal state—experienced as “an emotion”—and the situation or event that you believe caused that emotion in the first place. In this sense, emotion categorization is functional."

Anyway, I could go on and on with other implications, but I'll stop here for space and see how, if at all, discussion develops.

Just as if i got hit on the head with a baseball bat, we would all agree i suffered a negative emotion.

I think what happens next is will i say to my self that i deserved (through stupidity or Karma) to get hit (sadness), or was the fact that i got hit someone elses fault (keyword fault) in which case i would feel anger.

Sadness and anger are common to all people.

Whether we feel sadness or anger is a matter of who we blame the negative situation on.

Reply to christian2017 tell us more expert.

Quoting StreetlightX

"In a sense, a situated conceptualization, because it is designed for action, provides you with a script to guide your future behavior in a specific context or situation. For example, across varied situations, different situated conceptualizations of anger will be computed. Sometimes it works to yell, sometimes to pound your fist, sometimes to cry or walk away, sometimes to hit. During a given act of conceptualizing core affect, the simulation can shape a person’s behavior in line with what has been experienced before in that sort of situation (or one very much like it). As a result, situated conceptualizations deliver highly specific inferences tailored to particular situations regarding what actions to take" (from "Solving the Paradox").

Okay, I’m with you now. This also corresponds to @Coben’s issue. The internal affect is not the emotion: the conceptualisation is the emotion, which can just as easily be ‘evoked’ as such from actions and facial expressions as from interoception of affect. You’re not ‘feeling’ fear, you’re conceptualising fear as an emotion. The hypothesis is not that any body state can be freely interpreted - it’s that emotional concepts are not universally inherent or instinctual, but rather constructed from cultural experiences.

Quoting Coben

But it certainly does happen that people can think they are sad when they are angry - some women have this pattern, especially if they are in traditional subcultures. But here what happens is there is a conversion. The anger arises, it is suppressed and then in reaction to that process (which is habitual, rapid and nearly unconscious) the person feels sad. And can also get some relief from the suppression of emotion by expressing sadness. So in a sense they are not wrong, though they haven't really expressed or notice their initial emotional reaction.

That all said, I just don't buy the hypothesis yet.

I can relate to what you describe as ‘relief from suppression of emotion by expressing sadness’, but I disagree with your assessment. I’ve learned to recognise this seemingly involuntary flow of tears as a relief of tension (not suppression of emotion) - I’ve noticed that there is no negative affect associated with the reaction. I don’t ‘feel sad’ in these situations - although I used to think I felt sad because why else would I be crying - what I feel is relief. There is no ‘suppressed’ emotion - what you conceptualise as ‘anger’ can be a raised heart rate, flushed face and knotted stomach, which is the body readying to respond to an anticipated threat. That’s not necessarily an emotion that requires labelling, and it’s not necessarily ‘anger’ that needs to be expressed/suppressed.

Quoting Hanover

Maybe it's cold, maybe it's scary. I really don't know. I do know he wasn't taught to cry and he never learned to cry. I also think there must be a moment in everyone's life when they experience a new emotion they hadn't previously felt. There is the feeling of love, of heartbreak, of loss, of disappointment that occur in our lives as new. When were they learned?

Insofar as they are new they can only have been learnt. That's what learning is. But let me try and answer more substantively. I can't address your whole post without going on forever, so let me stick to learning and development. To start with a neuronal fact: cognitively, learning takes place not by additive means but by subtractive ones. The brain learns by culling from the environment what is not deemed relevant, and habituates by selecting and picking out of an overabundance of 'stimuli' what is and is not needed to operate in some manner. To quote form Adrian Johnson (who is himself quoting the neuroscientists Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jospeh LeDoux) on this:

Adrian Johnson - Affects Are Signifiers:"Apropos neurology, Changeux's theory of learning reflects what LeDoux characterizes as the “use it or lose it” doctrine of neural “selectionism.” According to this doctrine, the initial “exuberance” of an infant?s neural networks—there are more synaptic connections present in early stages of development than will be needed later by the more mature organism—is pruned down through “subtraction,” through the exchanges between organism and environment determining which connections will be used (and, hence, will be kept) and which ones won?t be used (and, hence, will be allowed to wither away). Changeux describes this selectionist process as “the epigenetic stabilization of common neural networks”"

This account of learning can be placed into productive consonance with Barrett's own account of emotion as a matter of conceptual evaluation upon 'core affect' (what I referred to as generic affect) [a note to set the language straight: Barrett distinguishes between affect on the one hand, and emotion on the other - the two are not the same, and 'emotion' can be understood to be the 'end result' of a evaluation upon affectivity]. Anyway, as I was saying, in these terms, the emergence of a 'new emotion' can be understood to be subtractive: to have an emotion is to pay attention to this, rather than that aspect of experience - which itself largely forces or at least impels certain evaluative contexts, in ways that can be wholly novel.

This is just what 'evaluation' is: emotion is evaluative, it's production (as heartbreak, as love, as loss) is a response (a 'solution' in Barrett's terms) to a mixture of environment and history which informs it (ignoring what does not - subtraction). This is exactly in line with Barrett's account of the emergence of a 'new' emotion. Here she is, writing about her daughter leaning how to emote anger:

FB - How Emotions Are Made:"I try to imagine how my daughter, Sophia, might have learned emotion concepts when she was an infant, guided by the emotion words that my husband and I spoke to her intentionally. In our culture, one goal in “Anger” is to overcome an obstacle that someone blameworthy has put in your path... If my hypothesis is correct, she learned statistically to associate these diverse body patterns and contexts with the sounds “an-gry,” just like associating a squeaking toy with the sound “wug.” Eventually, the word “angry” invited my daughter to search for a way in which these instances were the same, even if on the surface they looked and felt different. In effect, Sophia formed a rudimentary concept whose instances were characterized by a common goal: overcoming an obstacle. And most importantly, Sophia learned which actions and feelings most effectively achieved this goal in each situation.

In this way, Sophia’s brain would have bootstrapped the concept “Anger” into its neural architecture. When we first used the word “angry” with Sophia, we constructed her experiences of anger with her. We focused her attention, guiding her brain to store each instance in all its sensory detail. The word helped her to create commonalities with all the other instances of “Anger” already in her brain. Her brain also captured what preceded and followed those experiences. All of this became her concept of “Anger."... If I am correct, then, as children continue to develop their concept of “Anger,” they learn that not all instances of “Anger” are constructed for the same goal in every situation. “Anger” can also be for protecting oneself against an offense, dealing with someone who acted unfairly, desiring aggression toward another person, wanting to win a competition or to enhance performance in some way, or wishing to appear powerful

(my bolding).

So novelty is not opposed to learning. In fact, as I began with - novelty and learning are inseparable.

Quoting chustavo

tell us more expert.

there alot of people who read books on this forum. If you would like to talk to someone who reads books you won't have to look hard on this forum. Reading a book doesn't make someone an expert.

Quoting Possibility

The internal affect is not the emotion: the conceptualisation is the emotion, which can just as easily be ‘evoked’ as such from actions and facial expressions as from interoception of affect. You’re not ‘feeling’ fear, you’re conceptualising fear as an emotion. The hypothesis is not that any body state can be freely interpreted - it’s that emotional concepts are not universally inherent or instinctual, but rather constructed from cultural experiences.

Yeah, it's important not to conflate this with a kind of 'voluntarist' account of emotion where I can simply feel whatever I want whenever I want. In fact, the context-senstitivity of emotion on this account should militate very strongly against that reading: insofar as emotions are supremely context-sensitive, not just any emotion can follow from any situation. 'Sad' moments impel the production of sad emotions, frightening ones impel the production of fearful emotions (I also prefer the word 'production' here rather than Feldman's 'construction' precisely because the latter has a bit too strong of a voluntarist ring to it) - although they do not mechanically 'determine' which emotions follow. Everything hinges on developmental history, emotional habits, the singularity of context and so on.

The only this I would alter somewhere with respect to what you've said is that yeah - one conceptualized fear as an emotion and then subsequently, one really does feel fear as a result. The conceptualization and the feeling are inseparably bound.

Reply to christian2017 alright brother i admit my defeat, but blaming without knowing the cause will not help you.

but why i enter into this arguement ? since i dont wish to enter into the arguement. ( expert )

Quoting StreetlightX

The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express': one feels, viscerally, anger, which one then expresses by stomping a foot, clenching a fist, or having a yell. This is a view of emotion which has begun to be challenged by recent studies, which instead posit that emotions - or at least specific emotions, like anger, shame, happiness, and sadness - are conceptual reterojections which we attribute or impute to bodily states which are not 'in-themselves', sad, happy, angry or whathaveyou.

I had to reread How Emotions Are Made about three times in order to wrap my head around this new view.

Quoting chustavo

alright brother i admit my defeat, but blaming without knowing the cause will not help you.

but why i enter into this arguement ? since i dont wish to enter into the arguement. ( expert )

i agree.

Quoting Coben

Widen eyes, breath shallowly but rapidly, tilt the neck back and you will feel fear. (note I have taken the training but my memory is not at all perfect). And the details of the breathing

A note on this - this is, in a way, exactly what follows from the kind of account given here (hence my quick reference to William James in the OP: emotion follows from action - it is a product, a result, not an origin). Where, perhaps, there is disagreement here is on the next step. On the account here there is no one-to-one mapping of action to emotion - the same action can be evaluated to correspond to different emotions. I can't speak too much about Alba emotion training - this is the first I've heard of it though it sounds really interesting! - but perhaps it is precisely because all that context is missing - the 'cues' - that you always seem to get the same result. You're holding context stable, so it makes sense that what follows is also stable. But if emoting is context-sensitive, then adding those cues ought to be able to modify the emotion felt. So I'm not sure what you've written - although fascinating - counts as a counter-example. It may even count as evidence for it.

Quoting praxis

I had to reread How Emotions Are Made about three times in order to wrap my head around this new view.

I haven't yet read the book - it's been sitting on my shelf for the last however many months and I only have the discipline to read one book at a time - but the papers seem to do a pretty good job at relaying her position. In a way I've been pre-disposed to her view because of my particular philosophical background - I fact I came across it after discussing similar themes with @fdrake here and subsequently totally geeked out when I realized it said what I was only vaguely gesturing at in incredibly clear and far more substantiated manner than I could have dreamed of.

Quoting schopenhauer1

How early does she think that emotions are constructed? Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?

Her view is that it’s something we continually construct as we encounter new situations - but that as adults we try to avoid prediction error, and in doing so avoid opportunities to refine our concepts.

She does go into a fair amount of detail in demonstrating how the infant brain efficiently constructs concepts similar to video optimisation for YouTube: separating similarities from differences in how it represents sensory information (as patterns of firing neurons).

Lisa Feldman Barrett, “How Emotions Are Made”:For example, the visual system represents a straight line as a pattern of neurons firing in a primary visual cortex. Suppose that a second group of neurons fires to repent a second line at a ninety degree angle to the first line. A third group of neurons could summarise this statistical relationship between the two lines efficiently as a simple concept of ‘Angle’. The infant brain might encounter a hundred different pairs of intersecting line segments of varying lengths, thickness, and colour, but conceptually they are all instances of ‘Angle’, each of which gets efficiently summarised by some smaller group of neurons. These summaries eliminate redundancy. In this manner, the brain separates statistical similarities from sensory differences.
In the same manner, the instances of the concept ‘Angle’ are themselves part of other concepts. For example, an infant receives visual input about her mother’s face from many different vantage points: while nursing, while sitting face to face, in the morning and the evening. Her concept of ‘Angle’ will be part of her concept ‘Eye’ that summarises the continuously changing lines and contours of her mother’s eyes seen at different angles and in different luminance. Different groups of neurons fire to represent the various instances of the concept ‘Eye’, allowing the infant to recognise those eyes as her mother’s eyes each time, regardless of the sensory differences.
As we go from the very specific to increasingly general concepts (in this example, from line to angle to eye), the brain creates similarities that are progressively more efficient summaries of the information. For example, ‘Angle’ is an efficient summary with respect to lines but is a sensory detail with respect to eyes. the same logic works for the concepts ‘nose’ and ‘Ear’ and so on. Together, these concepts are part of the concept ‘Face’, whose instances are yet more efficient summaries of the sensory regularities in facial features. Eventually, the infant’s brain forms summary representations for enough visual concepts that she can see one stable object, despite incredible variation in low-level sensory details. Think about it: each of your eyes transmits millions of tiny pieces of information to your brain in a moment, and you simply see ‘a book’.

Quoting StreetlightX

The only this I would alter somewhere with respect to what you've said is that yeah - one conceptualized fear as an emotion and then subsequently, one really does feel fear as a result. The conceptualization and the feeling are inseparably bound.

This is where the language can get confusing. We say that we ‘feel’ the affect as well as the emotion, but they’re not identical - we interact with them in different ways, at different levels of awareness.

Reply to StreetlightX

I guess the older view was really embedded for me, plus I'm not too bright.

Feldman Barrett, 'Solving:Said more simply, properties that are pointed out by parents (or other speakers) or those that are functionally relevant in everyday activities will bind to core affect to represent anger in that instance. As instances of anger accumulate, and information is integrated across instances, a simulator for anger develops, and conceptual knowledge about anger accrues. The resulting conceptual system is a distributed collection of modality- specific memories captured across all instances of a category. These establish the conceptual content for the basic-level category anger and can be retrieved for later simulations of anger.

@Possibility

I guess a central question to this, and something @Hanover sort of touched on is the difference between affectivity and emotion. How is she using these terms differently? It seems a bit shoe-horned like there is indeed some core (innate?) reaction going on, and emotion is how to take this innate reaction and apply it to various contexts and situations by learning and socio-cultural cues. But then, this leaves affectivity itself to be explained, doesn't it? I guess this might be answered more clearly in understanding what her definition of affectivity is, and how that arises versus emotion. If it is more "innate" then, wouldn't that itself point to emotions automatically mapping to certain situations, that would almost "force it's hand" to always be used in certain contexts? In that case, the affectivity is pushing the learning, and not the other way around. Again, I could be mistaken based on her definition of affectivity.

Quoting StreetlightX

(To paraphrase William James somewhat: we don't stop our feet because we are angry - we are angry because we stomp our feet: although it's a bit more complex than that).

Just for the hell of it, and for what it's worth, and because I'm a fan of John Dewey and this topic reminded me of something, here's what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say of his expansion or revision of James' view of emotions in an essay Dewey wrote in 1894:

"In actual cases of emotion, a perception excites a pre-organized physiological mechanism; our recognition of such changes just is the emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike” (James 1890 [1981: 450]). Dewey’s “The Theory of Emotion” (1894b & 1895, EW4) pressed James further, toward the integrated whole of feeling-and-expression. Being sad is not merely feeling sad or acting sad but is the purposive organism’s overall experience. This is Dewey’s attempt to gently correct James’ unfortunate reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, Dewey argued, we must see that “the mode of behavior is the primary thing” (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 174). As with habit, emotion is not the private possession of the subject, but rather emerges from the fluid boundary connecting event and organism; emotion is “called out by objects, physical and personal”, an intentional “response to an objective situation” (EN, LW1: 292). If I encounter a strange dog and I am perplexed as to how to react, there is an inhibition of habit, and this excites emotion. As I entertain a range of incompatible responses (Run? Call out? Slink away?), a tension is created which further interrupts and inhibits habits, and is experienced as emotion (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 182) Thus, emotions are intentional insofar as they are “to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea” and not merely reactions “in the head” (AE, LW10: 72)."

Quoting StreetlightX

The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express

Quoting StreetlightX

At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations.

A one-easy-trick-emotional-theorists-hate-him perspective, not to negate what you're saying, but to try to better draw out what you take the significance of all this to be.

It goes like this:

The classical view of emotion mixed up 'emotion' with 'affect.' It's not emotions which are simply felt, but affects. Affects are subsequently expressed, not emotions. Emotions are expressions, affects are simply felt.

So: the mistake of people talking about emotions is they mislabeled them. What they were really talking about was affects. Just as we once thought different emotions can lead to the same action, we now say various affects can lead to the same actions. so forth. Just as we once knew from literature, conversation, life that the sturm of drang of violent emotion would take a more understandable form as we grew and learned to understand ourselves, now we know its the sturm and drang of violent affects.

What does this miss?

Reply to csalisbury Then, a bold new theory of how affects are constructed...

Quoting csalisbury

What does this miss?

Affect is not violent - it has intensity, but it is internal sensory information only.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Is it something that is learned very young and then is relatively fixed, or in her view, is it something that we continually construct as we encounter new situations and compare it to what we have seen, causing rough patterns around emotional response?

I think it's been demonstrated that smoking weed as a teenager, and sometimes even into the early twenties, affects one's emotional development. So I don't think it could be something learned very young then fixed. Puberty appears to play a significant role in emotional development.

Reply to Possibility I didn't mean violence against others, but violent in the sense of, well, intense - as one talks about a 'violent wind' etc.

Reply to Snakes Alive This is my suspicion. I think Bloom's misprision is a good guiding light. I think we forget what others knew, which you can get a dim sense of by looking at the infinite complexity with which people spoke of 'emotions.' Then you say emotions only meant this. And then, having limted what 'emotion' means, you introduce a new language which just says all of what youve missed but as a new discovery. I am open to correction though.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I guess a central question to this, and something Hanover sort of touched on is the difference between affectivity and emotion. How is she using these terms differently? It seems a bit shoe-horned like there is indeed some core (innate?) reaction going on, and emotion is how to take this innate reaction and apply it to various contexts and situations by learning and socio-cultural cues. But then, this leaves affectivity itself to be explained, doesn't it? I guess this might be answered more clearly in understanding what her definition of affectivity is, and how that arises versus emotion. If it is more "innate" then, wouldn't that itself point to emotions automatically mapping to certain situations, that would almost "force it's hand" to always be used in certain contexts? In that case, the affectivity is pushing the learning, and not the other way around. Again, I could be mistaken based on her definition of affectivity.

This what Feldman Barrett has to say about affect.

FB - ‘How Emotions Are Made’:Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. the pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favourite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energised feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect...
Affect...depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, the brightness and loudness. When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents interoceptive changes, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation and calmness. Affect, brightness, and loudness all accompany you from birth to death.

Quoting praxis

I guess the older view was really embedded for me, plus I'm not too bright.

Being predisposed to her view makes it easier to follow - it’s a paradigm shift, in many ways. We’ve always ‘known’ that emotions are ‘inherently’ understood by those around us, but there is a fuzziness to the concepts that we also can’t deny. So much of the suffering we experience and cause in the world can be traced to affective realism and prediction errors in how we conceptualise emotions. Understanding that affect is not emotion enables us to interpret interoceptive changes more carefully, and be open to the value of prediction error in the scientific method, I think.

But I think the most valuable part of her theory is how concepts relate both to sensory information through neuron firing patterns, and to action through prediction.

Reply to csalisbury Once you see through it, there's no going back...

It took the OLP's to make me see it, I'm ashamed to admit.

Reply to Snakes Alive Good news for all of us - according to Bloom, misprision's the sign of a strong spirit. But then you have to create.

Reply to csalisbury I don't know, these verbal games just strike me as boring. Maybe it's an avenue for creativity, but sometimes I feel like I would rather learn something in the banal sense, not 'learn' something with quotes (shuffle concepts).

The misprison is where you misinterpret your forebearers, right?

Reply to Snakes Alive yeah, that's right about misprision. I don't know him as well as I feign. What I understand him to mean is that every mature poet offers a Big Poem (or a body of work that can be considered as a Big Poem) and that later poets have to carve out their own space, for their own passions. They misread the old poem, but neccessarily, and in doing so, actually come up with something new. A lot of it is repetition, but the confusion secretes something actually new.


I also think learning something banal would be its own reward. But there's maybe a double thing of learning how to deal with the part of yourself that wants to make the thing you're learning link up to something else? There's the learning something banal and then a side thing of learning how to learn something banal, if that makes sense?

Going afield tho

Quoting StreetlightX

On the account given here, this is exactly the wrong way to look at things. Or at least, it is only half the story. As a matter of conceptual evaluation, emotions are not simply reactions to stimuli, but involve a degree of intentionality which cannot be reduced to causality. This is why emotions are a skill - a matter of learning. To quote Barrett again on this exact topic: "Core affect [what I referred to above as 'generic affect'] is caused—it represents the state of the person in relation to the immediate environment (in philosophical terms, this is its intension), but “cause” and “aboutness” are not equivalent. [However], when we identify our core affect as being about something, it becomes intentional, and the experience of emotion begins."

Part of what is at stake here is calling into question any simplified - much too simplified - distinction between 'emotions vs rationality'. There is a rationality specific to emotions, in strong sense that emotions are not simply 'caused' but also partake of an inferential economy. Worth quoting another paper of hers two, especially with respect to your recent interest in brains:

"As an animal’s integrated physiological state changes constantly throughout the day, its immediate past determines the aspects of the sensory world that concern the animal in the present, which in turn influences what its niche will contain in the immediate future. This observation prompts an important insight: neurons do not lie dormant until stimulated by the outside world, denoted as stimulus->response. Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli. The implications of these insights are profound: namely, it is very unlikely that perception, cognition, and emotion are localized in dedicated brain systems, with perception triggering emotions that battle with cognition to control behavior. This means classical accounts of emotion, which rely on this S->R narrative, are highly doubtful" (Barrett, "The Theory of Constructed Emotion", my bolding).

I feel I'm in agreement with most of what Barrett says about emotions. There seems to be a hidden logic behind feelings - the "about-ness" you referred to - and, as far as I can tell, it boils down to survival, survival as an individual entity, as a social entity, as the thing one identifies as the self or as a integral part of that self. Emotions, on that view, is the logic of self-preservartion with a scope coextensive with what one thinks of as me and mine.

As for learning emotions, I think of it in terms of developing the skill to express the right feelings at the right time about the right things, toward the right people, for the right end, and in the right way (1106b). [Aristotle, Golden Mean]. It seems Feldman Barrett isn't the first person to suggest that emotions are not completely devoid of rationality and that people should learn to deploy them on the right occasion in the right way.

FB - ‘How Emotions Are Made’:Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. the pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favourite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energised feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect...
Affect...depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, the brightness and loudness. When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents interoceptive changes, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation a

I hadn't realized this when I first posted on this thread, but I do know Feldman, sort of. I listened to her interview with Ezra Klein on the Ezra Klein Show. Ezra, courteously, explained he read the book and that it made him think of how sometimes he doesn't know what he's feeling until he thinks about it after. She says 'yes, exactly' (or something similar) and, in that moment of connection, you can't help but come away with the feeling he read her book.

Quoting Possibility

Being predisposed to her view makes it easier to follow - it’s a paradigm shift, in many ways. We’ve always ‘known’ that emotions are ‘inherently’ understood by those around us, but there is a fuzziness to the concepts that we also can’t deny. So much of the suffering we experience and cause in the world can be traced to affective realism and prediction errors in how we conceptualise emotions.

How would you characterize the paradigm shift? What was the old paradigm and what is the new?

Quoting csalisbury

What does this miss?

I suppose that what interests me isn't really the affect/emotion distinction, which sure, is objectively interesting or whatever, but that's just mechanism. What's more striking to me is the change in status of emotion: not as a primitive [emotion = express [anger] [sadness] [joy]], but as a product that has a kind of basis in biology but is deeply, in-itself, socially and culturally mediated and routed. The account implies a kind of autonomy of emotion (implied in the language of say, 'anger scripts' that Barrett uses), which is not merely a matter of personal I-really-really-feel-it-in-my-gut-it-expresses-the-depths-of-my-soul, but an embeddedness in culture and society, in a way that exceeds any simple interoiroization of emotion.

This in itself it now new of course - much earlier, neuroscientific theorists like Damasio (probably the most famous pop-neuroscientist?) had already considered a three-tiered approach to emotion ("a state of emotion, which can be triggered and executed nonconsciously; a state of feeling, which can be represented nonconsciously; and a state of feeling made conscious, i.e., known to the organism having both emotion and feeling" - Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens), while insisting that emotions are public rather than private phenomena; But what Barrett brings to the table is thinking of emotions as inferential results, an effort to cope with the environment in terms of 'predicting' an appropriate response (I haven't brought much if any of this side of things into the conversation yet).

So yeah, one would indeed need a theory of 'affect' in Barrett's sense as well - probably something to do with bodily homeostasis and movement, if I were to have a guess - but that's neither here nor there. The cool thing to me is the kind of bodily 'topology' that the approach inaugurates, where the inner is outer, and emotion is infused with reason.

Reply to StreetlightX Quoting StreetlightX

But what Barrett brings to the table is thinking of emotions as inferential results, an effort to cope with the environment in terms of 'predicting' an appropriate response (I haven't brought much if any of this side of things into the conversation yet).

To continue the conceit: What does this say beyond the idea that when most people feel an affect intensely, they express it in a way that fits the situation? '

To really draw this out - here's a fake passage from a fake YA fiction book:

'She felt a flutter of butterflies, a roller-coaster-feeling, but she knew there was no way her parents would understand. So she said she felt 'scared', that they'd understand.'

What does that leave out?

The subtext here is : what is going on that isn't just telling ourselves what we already know & believe in brittler language?

Quoting csalisbury

What does this say beyond the idea that when most people feel an affect intensely, they express it in a way that fits the situation? '

Lots more besides, but I think you're being performatively stupid atm.

Reply to StreetlightX Could be. But I sincerely think my YA example encompasses everything you were talking about in the quote I responded to. I think it was a legitimate response that legitimately tests the explanatory power of the theory you're discussing. I'm being contentious, for sure, but I don't think I'm being unfair.

if you want i can do a point by point breakdown of your post and my response

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

This is Dewey’s attempt to gently correct James’ unfortunate reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, Dewey argued, we must see that “the mode of behavior is the primary thing” (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 174). As with habit, emotion is not the private possession of the subject, but rather emerges from the fluid boundary connecting event and organism; emotion is “called out by objects, physical and personal”, an intentional “response to an objective situation” (EN, LW1: 292). If I encounter a strange dog and I am perplexed as to how to react, there is an inhibition of habit, and this excites emotion. As I entertain a range of incompatible responses (Run? Call out? Slink away?), a tension is created which further interrupts and inhibits habits, and is experienced as emotion (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 182) Thus, emotions are intentional insofar as they are “to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea” and not merely reactions “in the head”

This is really good, the bolded part in particular. I tried to skim over the essay but Dewey doesn't write in a way amenable to skimming for me. Gonna have to just read his books one day. Unsurprising that Dewey wrote on education - anyone who writes on education, pedagogy, seems to me to generally approach things the right way.

Quoting csalisbury

How would you characterize the paradigm shift? What was the old paradigm and what is the new?

Feldman Barrett refers to a ‘classical’ view of emotions:

FB:The classical view of emotion holds that we have many emotion circuits in our brains, and each is said to cause a distinct set of changes, that is, a fingerprint. Perhaps an annoying coworker triggers your ‘anger neurons’, so your blood pressure rises; you scowl, yell, and feel the heat of fury. Or an alarming news story triggers your ‘fear neurons’, so your heart races; you freeze and feel a flash of dread. Because we experience anger, happiness, surprise, and other emotions as clear and identifiable states of being, it seems reasonable to assume that each emotion has a defining underlying pattern in the brain and body.
Our emotions, according to the classical view, are artifacts of evolution, having long ago been advantageous for survival, and are now a fixed component of our biological nature. As such, they are universal: people of every age, in every culture, in every part of the world should experience sadness more or less as you do - and more or less as did our hominin ancestors who roamed the African savanna a million years ago.
Emotions are thus thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. The primitive part of your brain wants you to tell your boss he’s an idiot, but your deliberative side knows that doing so would get you fired, so you restrain yourself. This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilisation. It helps define you as human. Without rationality, you are merely an emotional beast

.

The new paradigm shows that emotions are not universal or instinctive in themselves, but are mental concepts or predictions constructed from patterns of experience, including rationality, specifically in relation to affect.

With regard to the new:

FB:If your brain operates by prediction and construction and rewires itself through experience, then it’s no overstatement to say that if you can change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow.

God, this sucks.

So instead of saying we're feeling emotional, we should be saying we're feeling affected? And the words themselves are emotional, and we must be feeling emotional or we wouldn't have expressed our feelings?

So we're both affected and emotional, even though emotions can create an affect?

I feel unaffected by this thread.

You can't feel unaffected. To feel is to be affected. Yet, you can feel unaffected.

I affect by un-feeling in this thread?

Quoting neonspectraltoast

You can't feel unaffected. To feel is to be affected. Yet, you can feel unaffected.

No. Affect is a constant current. To have consciousness is to be affected. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect. Emotion is how you interpret that affect in relation to experience.

Barrett's theory has absolutely nothing to do with the mere act of labelling sensations. It's not about saying "this is not 'anger', this is 'anger'" - She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'. If you looked for evidence of such a state in the brain you will fail to find any such thing. Same goes for all the other emotions. Likewise if you look for such a state psychologically, all you will find is a collection of behaviours no core of which can be demonstrated to be necessary, no single one of which sufficient.

In her 2017 paper she uses modern theories of computational neuroscience (active inference) to posit a possible means by which we come to categorise certain disparate and dissimilar collections of perception and interoception in the same class.

As @StreetlightX says in the OP, this has many interesting implications - it does for psychology no less, but the matter of whether she's right in the first instance shouldn't really be up for debate here. The question she's answering is the question of how we come to categorise disparate sensations in the same class. The fact the we do this from a neuroscientific point of view is relatively indisputable (at least not disputable without reference to neurological evidence of emotional states having some unified and identifiable correlates in the brain).

Her model might be wrong, but the need for an explanatory model is a live issue in both neuroscience and psychology, it's not a superficial re-branding.

Quoting Isaac

She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'.

I might prefer to say something like: there are many states called anger, each of them variantly evoked and produced across a range of different situations.

Quoting Isaac

She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'. If you looked for evidence of such a state in the brain you will fail to find any such thing.

Philosophy strikes again!

Quoting StreetlightX

I might prefer to say something like: there are many states called anger, each of them variantly evoked and produced across a range of different situations.

Yes, that's a better way of putting it from our (phenomenological?, never sure how to use that word properly) perspective.

From a neuroscience perspective, I think the current thinking (Sapolsky, Seth, LeDoux...) is that the collection of these states has no (or little) neurological significance, as a group. By which I mean constituent states (affects, perceptions... ) which form part of one of the experienced states called 'anger' have no more connections with each other than they do with constituent states typically associated with other emotional classes. Does that make sense?

I realise that position doesn’t really have much use here where we're talking about the consequences for us as we experience these things though. Just thought it might help underline the force behind Barrett's position.

Reply to Snakes Alive

It's not really philosophy. In order to be useful a class has to be such that it's members have some usefully distinguishing characteristics that are not shared in equal significance with similar members of other classes.

All that's happened here is we started investigating models of brain function using the classes given to us by our experience and we found them to be not so useful because we couldn't isolate any characteristics which uniquely identify members of that class. I'm not sure how they might better have proceeded, given the evidence they had.

Quoting Isaac

From a neuroscience perspective, I think the current thinking (Sapolsky, Seth, LeDoux...) is that the collection of these states has no (or little) neurological significance, as a group. By which I mean constituent states (affects, perceptions... ) which form part of one of the experienced states called 'anger' have no more connections with each other than they do with constituent states typically associated with other emotional classes. Does that make sense?

Yeah it does - anger is a kind of nominal melting pot: we put various ingredients in, and you get a family resemblance of results (called 'anger'), but no specific ingredient is necessary. I also wouldn't worry about Snakes too much. He's doesn't have anything of interest to say.

I wanna share what I think to be Feldman Barret's positive account from the paper "The Emotion Paradox", rather than dealing with the details of the evidence she presents for it.

Emotions are interoceptions. They are the body's perception of itself (through some modalities, like "somatovisceral information"). That means what we leverage to explain perception applies to emotion. Perception is task relative; what you see depends upon what you're doing; and mediated by a bunch of things. Your past experiences, what you've learned, how you conceptualise stuff. What you've learned influences what you see, what you're doing influences what you see, how you talk about what you see influences what you see. Those effects of "what you've learned", "how you conceptualise stuff" and "what you're doing" get put into the process of valuation.

Valuation is one part of how our bodies do emotions. The other part is core affect. Core affect, inn Barret's words is:

Core affect has been characterized as the constant stream of transient alterations in an organism’s neurophysiological state that represent its immediate relation to the flow of changing events

Core affect (i.e., the neurophysiological state) is available to consciousness and is experienced as feeling good or bad (valence) and to a lesser extent as activated or deactivated (arousal).

Core affect and valuation run in parallel all the time. Insofar as emotion is concerned, we are core affect machines and valuation machines. Valuation draws on resources outside core affect, and it modulates (or mediates) the emerging experience of emotion. The extra resources are anything that we could bring to bear to contextualise information; all these extra resources can be labelled as concepts. They're not only the "clear distinct ideas" of Russel, they're more general representations.

How they work together is that core affect updates its environmental and bodily information quickly, valuation updates itself a bit more slowly. If the environment and the body are food, core affect is chewing, valuation is digestion, emotion is the whole thing insofar as it's bodily.

To be able to label a state of core affect "anger", we have to have the cognitive resources in place not just to categorize it, but to devote enough of our attentional and representational resources to it that that a categorization ("I feel angry") emerges as an individuated description of our emotional state. As Barrett puts it, emotions are "perceptual symbols", like "red".

I argue that the process of categorization is fundamental to both color and person perception
and draw a parallel between these categorization processes and the way in which people use their knowledge of emotion categories to shape an experience of
emotion.

The usual folk psychology ways we talk about emotion are all post categorisation; we have distinct but overlapping (descriptions of) states like happiness, anger, shame, horniness. What we learn about these categorisations, the folk psychology stuff, influences how we feel. This intervention of resources outside core affect upon our emerging experience of emotion through learning simultaneously makes it discursively/culturally mediated and something that can be honed and practiced, a skill. Husserl called phenomenology "relearning how to see", Barrett may suggest that we can relearn how to feel.

The intervention learning has upon the emerging experience of emotion is not limitless; the processes that constitute core affect are linked to how the body is extremely likely to typify its own sensations/state; the body is predisposed to some emotions and responses. There are some biological primitives (central pattern generators) that valuation acts improvisationally upon, draws boundaries between, and leverages contextual information to interpret and prescribe what to do upon their (and core affect's) basis.

The way I've written it above may suggest that core affect and valuation are still reactive; they are means for digestion of environmental stimuli, and this always goes stimulus->response or behaviour->feeling. This isn't true; valuation is predictive/prescriptive, and this is fleshed out in some of her later work. In the paper "The Theory of Constructed Emotions", Barrett leverages Bayesian brain ideas about concepts and perception to refine how emotions are predictive/prescriptive, not simply reactive. Emotion is in some regard anticipated behaviour that is expected to be effective and salient in summarising our body's situation (including current task and goals).

I hypothesize that in assembling populations of predictions, each one having some probability of being the best fit to the current circumstances (i.e., Bayesian priors), the brain is constructing concepts (Barrett, 2017) or what Barsalou refers to as ‘ad hoc’ concepts (Barsalou, 1983, 2003; Barsalou et al., 2003). In the language of the brain, a concept is a group of distributed ‘patterns’ of activity across some population of neurons.

Valuation becomes a patterning of core affect(s); patterning is always going on in the emerging experience of emotion, so it modulates emotion; emotions are a "what's now? what's next" rather than just a "this just happened", and "this just happened" is part of informing "what's now? what next?".

As Barrett puts it:

A brain can be thought of as running an internal model that controls central pattern generators in the service of allostasis (for more on pattern generators, see Burrows, 1996; Sterling and Laughlin, 2015; Swanson, 2000). An internal model runs on past experiences, implemented as concepts. A concept is a collection of embodied, whole brain representations that predict what is about to happen in the sensory environment, what the best action is to deal with impending events, and their consequences for allostasis (the latter is made available to consciousness as affect). Unpredicted information (i.e. prediction error) is encoded and consolidated whenever it is predicted to result in a physiological change in state of perceiver (i.e. whenever it impacts allostasis). Once prediction error is minimized, a prediction becomes a perception or an experience. In doing so, the prediction explains the cause of sensory events and directs action; i.e. it categorizes the sensory event. In this way, the brain uses past experience to construct a categorization [a situated conceptualization; (Barsalou, 1999; Barsalou et al., 2003; Barrett, 2006b; Barrett et al., 2015)] that best fits the situation to guide action. The brain continually constructs concepts and creates categories to identify what the sensory inputs are, infers a causal explanation for what caused them, and drives action plans for what to do about them. When the internal model creates an emotion concept, the eventual categorization results in an instance of emotion.

Summarizing my understanding of this view: there's an interpretive conceptual layer not just through which emotions pass, but which in itself is a structuring element in the production of an emotion, such that emotions can't be considered primarily as biological effects absent of sociocultural context. In fact, sociocultural contexts expressed through individual brains shape the production of emotions (or more accurately, shape biological affects, the precursors of emotions, making these recognizable as such) and, in doing so, draw landscapes of rationality, which we then ironically sequester as conceptual buttresses against emotional impulses. So the folk view of emotion is partly the result of a process in which emotion, as more accurately understood, is always active, and this undermines the folk dichotomy between reason and emotion, concepts and feelings. Evidence from neoroscience lends weight to this view by showing brain activity involved in emotion to be widely distributed across modules traditionally associated with other aspects of cognition.

Quoting StreetlightX

One might say: the meaning of emotions are their use.

Or, going on the above, that the meaning of emotions are the context in which they are experienced and there is no clear division possible between "subjective"/internal context and "objective"/external context because the packaging of the raw material of emotion is dependent on both and without it there is no emotional shape definable (with emotional shape being translatable into distinct emotion, anger, sadness etc).

(I see @fdrake has just posted. Going to read that before writing more.)

This discussion's going well. Soon it might obtain to the level of understanding which Plato demonstrated. Emotion was proposed by Plato as the medium between body and mind to solve the commonly cited problem for dualism, of causal interaction.

In Plato's moral philosophy, the emotions, "spirit" or "passion" in common translations, might ally with the mind, controlling the body to act in a reasonable way, but in some cases the mind hasn't the necessary control over the passions, they side with the impulses of the body, causing irrational thinking by the mind, consequently irrational actions.

Plato's proposed State, in The Republic is designed around this three part division of the human being. The rulers are philosophers, applying principles of knowledge in their rule. The Guardians are that medium group represented by emotions, the police, military, enforcing the rule with spirit, ambition, and honour, allied with the rulers. He likens the Guardians to dogs, when they are well trained they obey their master, but if not they will disobey, and even turn against their master. The third group are the skilled workers, providing for the needs of all, we might call them professionals.

He also describes the corruption of the State, through this same comparison of the State to the three parts of human being. It's interesting how he goes both ways in the analogy, taking observation from the State and applying them to the individual, and taking observations of the individual and applying them to the State. This capacity to go both ways demonstrates the accuracy of the analogy. Corruption starts with the medium level, the Guardians, obtaining too much power. Positive emotions, like ambition and spirit are honoured, valued and sought by the philosopher rulers, becoming higher in priority than rational principles. This allows the Guardians who rule by emotion, to overtake the rule of rational philosophical principles. The new rulers, formerly the medium, have no more honour, that being provided for by the philosophical principles of reason, having overthrown that rule. They now start to follow money, the currency of the third group, the professionals. This turns them toward being subservient to that body of professionals, passing the power of rule over to them. This is the end State of corruption, democracy. What follows democracy is tyranny, as an effort to salvage the State from that highly corrupted condition.

Quoting fdrake

Your past experiences, what you've learned, how you conceptualise stuff. What you've learned influences what you see, what you're doing influences what you see, how you talk about what you see influences what you see. Those effects of "what you've learned", "how you conceptualise stuff" and "what you're doing" get put into the process of valuation.

....Husserl called phenomenology "relearning how to see", Barrett may suggest that we can relearn how to feel.

One thing that seems quite striking to me is exactly this parallel with phenomenology; just as Husserl gave an account of perception in terms of the 'as-structure' of intentional experience (to see is to see something as something), so too here is there something like an "emoting-as": one emotes-as-anger, emotes-as-frightened, emotes-as-grieving. One of the super interesting things about this particular account however, in a way that Husserl arguably did not, is that it acknowledges that not all emotion conforms to the as-structure. The structure is incredibly leaky and pliable. Affects and unacknowledged emotions circulate beneath the level of explicit emotion (cognitively-recognized emotion), and, as per 'misfelt feelings', there can be all sorts of crossed wires and potentially 'misidentified' and misconstrued feelings.

It instils a kind of gap within the subject in which where what is usually taken to be the most sure thing ("I may not know anything, but I know how I feel") can itself be a source of confusion. This should not of course be surprising - "I don't know how I feel/I feel a mix of emotions" are common experiences. But I really like this kind of 'two-level' (at least) account of emotion that allows for thinking about all kinds of emotional 'pathology' as it were, in which things can go wrong. Which comes back, of course, to your question about transcendental illusions and their applicability to emotion.

Continuing from here.

The titular "Emotion Paradox" from the paper is that:

People are compelled by their own experiences to believe that emotions exist as natural-kind entities, yet a century of research has not produced a strong evidentiary basis for this belief. To date, there is no clear, unambiguous criterion for indicating the presence of anger or sadness or fear.

So there are two thrusts of it: (1) people are compelled by their experiences to believe that emotions exist as natural kind entities (categories of experience, analogising "anger" to "the human leg") but (2) there's no evidence that emotions actually work like that.

The paper addresses this by trying to explain how those beliefs in emotions as discrete/partitioned entity types come about by describing a mechanism of emotion; the categorisation arises as a prediction and contextualisation of one's bodily state in a task which is cognitively, discursively and culturally mediated while weighing all those things in the light of past and current experience.

I imagine it that we have a (pliable, modifiable) emotional vocabulary of concepts that our self models evaluate in terms of (@Isaac, dunno if this is actually a good analogy, you'd definitely know more about it); this is like/is due to/arises from that, most broadly this is associated with that. The "this" and "that" are rarely articulated, due to being fuzzy uncategorised interminglings of all the signals we have in the body and from the environment. Something which someone articulates about their emotional state, then by necessity, must already have been weighed and measured by the process of valuation that mediates these signals and found to be a "best fit" summary of the state (given prior experience).

Edit: regarding the "fuzziness" of the categories; it reads like the process of categorisation is something that's evaluating all the time, categorisation itself isn't an "on/off" thing, or a single step mapping from "fuzzy core affect" to "distinguished emotion", it's that core affect is always more or less categorised; maybe parametrising it or thinking of it in terms of an intensity is helpful; there's a sliding scale from "completely uncategorised" to "completely distinct" that our affect(s) are constantly charted on by the process of valuation; but it's always in this or that category (what box things are put in matters), and categories are learnable.

Categorizing is fundamental cognitive activity. A category is a class of things that are treated as equivalent. To categorize something is to determine what it is, why it is, and what to do with it. A concept can be thought of as a collection of mental representations for
a category that people draw on during the process of categorization. Once conceptual knowledge is brought to bear to categorize something as one kind of thing and not another, the thing becomes meaningful. It then becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about
that thing, predict about how best to act on it, and communicate our experience of the thing to others.

There are inbuilt tendencies in these associations (central pattern generators), I imagine they give rise to whatever cultural universals we have regarding emotion.

Quoting StreetlightX

The structure is incredibly leaky and pliable. Affects and unacknowledged emotions circulate beneath the level of explicit emotion (cognitively-recognized emotion), and, as per 'misfelt feelings', there can be all sorts of crossed wires and potentially 'misidentified' and misconstrued feelings.

Yes! One consequence of emotions (the kind of thing we have when we say "I am sad" or whatever) being predictive, task relative, valuations is that they can be wrong, flawed, not fit for purpose. They can be misattributions, inaccurate or mis-focussed summaries of the current bodily state relative to its context(ualised task), we can find the wrong things meaningful (salient), they can suggest ineffective actions - I imagine there are other nuances of the errors we can make in feeling; special emphasis, feeling itself; but I can't think of more now.

Quoting StreetlightX

Which comes back, of course, to your question about transcendental illusions and their applicability to emotion.

I'm beginning to think that transcendental illusions are separate in character from the predictive errors spoken about in this approach; insofar as transcendental illusions are necessary failures of reason generated by its misapplication, I don't think they'd apply to the contingent error prone-ness of valuations. I'm not saying that there aren't transcendental illusions for emotion, but I can't see a neat way of linking the paper to the question I wrote to you (summarised: "Are there analogues of transcendental illusions in emotion?").

Emotions like anger are ill-defined, per se, the word wrath is symbolic of an anger-like emote, but does that mean something like anger is nons?

I feel as if the proposal tones down the concept.

I can judge someone less aware than me, as being in a specific emotional state - again - this man is angry.

You're saying or I've misunderstood, that I don't accurately judge a man's anger, using this term 'anger'.

A man is experienced in his mental youth being emotional far easier than a mature man who knows more, hiding such weakness from sense.

You can use an emotional state against another, stronger when angry, weaker when scared, but not all the time.

If I view you crying, I'll assume you're sad - for all I know you may be happy but - you show signs of a person who's sad and I'm now using it advantegously.

Because of this, it's toned down - you propose I can't do this, or we're becoming so knowledgable I'll never sense it. That's, I think, wrong.

A couple of things that might be useful to bear in mind with this stuff.

1.

Our valuation of the interoception/perception of stimuli is not idle journal-writing. The prediction the we vocalise as an emotion category is the attempt to render into language a model of our state which actually has a purpose beyond that report. In the classical model this is already taken care of (the 'emotion' puts the brain in a state better able to carry out the task at hand). With an active inference model though, we have a much more interesting intersection. So our model predicts the cause of our state, but, as with perception, it's a proactive model, it tests the theory by taking action 'as if' it were the case and responding to errors.

In perception, this might take the form of looking for edges or forms we expect to be there (once we've predicted it's a rabbit, we look for the ears).

In affect modelling, we'd be doing something like focusing on our skin response once we've formed a predictive model of fear based on, say, our heart rate. This can extend to external responses too, so that aspects of our environment become brought into focus depending on their role in the whole 'anger' story-line. The emotion is not just felt within our own bodies but is an interactive experience with our environment. Others take part in it.

Evidence for this comes from differential emotional reports in different environments in response to the same stimuli.

(Took me longer to write that than I thought it would... 2. later...)

Quoting fdrake

The paper addresses this by trying to explain how those beliefs in emotions as discrete/partitioned entity types come about by describing a mechanism of emotion; the categorisation arises as a prediction and contextualisation of one's bodily state in a task which is cognitively, discursively and culturally mediated while weighing all those things in the light of past and current experience.

An emotion, in its most instinctual form is the most general and vague thing, if it could even be called a thing. It becomes specified and narrowed down through intentional direction. We could take an emotion with much evidence of its nature, like desire, as an example. In it's raw form, something like hunger is a general hollow, empty feeling of discomfort, want. Without knowing the feeling, one would not even recognize the significance of that feeling, as hunger. So to apprehend it we must first narrow down the field, identify this feeling of desire, and recognize this particular type of desire as hunger. In a well cared for society such as ours, many of us might not have ever experienced enough desire to be able to recognize its existence as that hollow empty feeling of want.

In consideration of options to satisfy one's hunger, a person might narrow down the general desire further, directing it toward particular items which might be consumed. There is a force of habit which gets involved here, allowing us to short-circuit, or bypass all that narrowing down. We can get what we need without suffering the emotions because we know that we need it and it's available. But this may result in a craving for a particular type of item under some circumstances, or perhaps even a particular object. This bypass habit which directs the emotions into partitioned types without proceeding through the rational narrowing down process, may be either healthy or unhealthy, as habits can be good or bad.

Quoting StreetlightX

Dewey doesn't write in a way amenable to skimming for me.

H.L. Mencken said that Dewey was "the worst writer ever heard of in America." I wouldn't go that far, but he's difficult to read, no doubt about it. He's worth the effort, I think, because he invariably sees us as organisms living in an environment and addresses questions raised from that standpoint, something I find appealing. Larry Hickman is a philosopher who I think is good at clarifying his thought, something not easy to do given Dewey's very dense style.

... Barrett's point about cognitive systems maintaining allostasis is, I think, more than just a neuroscientific one. It emphasises the role of interoception as forward-acting (it generates some following set of reactions, rather than just backward-acting, suppressing existing responses) something else afterwards . So a model, is a kind "this is like/is due to/arises from that" (to borrow @fdrake's expression), but it cannot really be separated from "...and this is what I do about it" because the doing is part of the loop updating the priors.

2.

I think this...

Quoting fdrake

I imagine there are other nuances of the errors we can make in feeling;

... is important to understand the implications of this model. One experiment done on generating responses in mice introduced an element of randomness to see if the inference of valence to a Pavlovian response would still confirm to a purely Bayesian model (bit of background, it does without valence, classic experiment on correcting errors in sensory conflict showed the predictions were almost perfectly Bayesian). On this occasion, they didn't. As soon as the expectation had valence the predictive model erred from purely probabilistic. Basically, the mice were reluctant to update their priors to reflect the probabilities they were experiencing when the expectation had valence. The model actually included the valuation of the result.

So with modelling emotion, we're not necessarily just modelling the most likely cause of the stimuli (and appropriate response), we're biasing those models in favour of certain predictions depending on the value we previously gave them. Technically an error. We act as if a particular model is a better explanation than it actually is.

Reply to StreetlightX We do not learn emotions as a skill , but we do have the skill to learn how to use emotions , which in itself brings a interesting Question . I become Angry , instinctively , in certain circumstances , yet in certain situations I will use the emotion of anger to get what I want , even when I am not actually angry . The use of sadness emotions to trigger the sympathy of another person is another example . Is this my conscious mind using these tactics , or my sub-conscious mind ? is this what I have learned to do , or was it instinctive ? . We are born with emotions in place , but we learn how to use them for our benefit in life .

Quoting TheMadFool

I feel I'm in agreement with most of what Barrett says about emotions. There seems to be a hidden logic behind feelings - the "about-ness" you referred to - and, as far as I can tell, it boils down to survival, survival as an individual entity, as a social entity, as the thing one identifies as the self or as a integral part of that self. Emotions, on that view, is the logic of self-preservartion with a scope coextensive with what one thinks of as me and mine.

It may be more accurate (or merely specific) to say that emotion is the logic of energy regulation, if I follow what you're saying correctly.

Reply to Snakes Alive

Philosophy rarely contains interpretations of dimension reduction techniques applied to psychometrics [hide=*](plotting emotional states as they were measured in 2D space and looking to partition them into things resembling discrete categories; nonoverlapping clusters in space;, doesn't work. This failure is evidence that the distinctions between emotions aren't as clear cut as even the words we use for them, nevermind elevating them to natural kinds))[/hide]; it isn't quite the same game here.

Reply to csalisbury

I think your "this is all the same as before" detectors are malfunctioning in this instance. There are predictive differences between the natural kinds view and the one Barrett's proposing, and they are referenced in what we're discussing. It might be the same "explanatory category making" game, but here the explanations do inform what predictions are made about how emotion functions (see the hidden thing * for an example). Experimental results about emotion make more (or less) sense depending on the view's content.

Of course, to both of you, being largely a philosophy discussion, we'll maybe be playing the same game in interpreting the view and relating it to "philosophical positions", but researchers using Barrett's paradigm will make sense of and predict different results than those of (at least some of) the views she's criticising.

Quoting Isaac

... Barrett's point about cognitive systems maintaining allostasis is, I think, more than just a neuroscientific one. It emphasises the role of interoception as forward-acting (it generates some following set of reactions, rather than just backward-acting, suppressing existing responses) something else afterwards . So a model, is a kind "this is like/is due to/arises from that" (to borrow fdrake's expression), but it cannot really be separated from "...and this is what I do about it" because the doing is part of the loop updating the priors.

To draw a really special emphasis on this point (which was lacking in how I presented it); the predictions of our self models are also in part proposed interventions; what can I do which is appropriate for my goal and the rest of my current model? It isn't like the whole model is just some epistemic device we use to learn about the world, the model is also sending out things like motor signals; lean closer to hear better, stuff like that. Our behaviour itself, our emotions themselves, are a sample from the model, and "exactly what we do" is a collapsed down form, a representative summary, of the model's state given (its own representation of) a current goal (and our expectations of environmental/bodily behaviours).

Edit: I'm not comfortable enough with the Construction of Emotion paper yet to talk about its mechanics in detail though, so I'm largely improvising in this based on my understanding of the work (in active perception) she's trying to integrate it with.

Reply to StreetlightX The trouble I have with this excellent analysis is that I'm not at al sure what a concept is.

So I might just note that concepts, if they are anything, are also action oriented. That is, the meaning of a concept is what you do with it.

It's also interesting that the result of the analysis seems to be the aggrandisement of what might be called the "cultivated soul". If emotions are a learned skill, we can differentiate the emotionally learned from the emotionally unschooled.

And that begins to look like a defence of middle class values; we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

Reply to StreetlightX

One of the really wild things about this account (for me) is that it can almost be 'translated' point-by-point into a Wittgensteinian account of concept-use in general.

Indeed, much of it sounds like reheated Wittgenstein. Does she acknowledge the influence at least?

Quoting Banno

If emotions are a learned skill, we can differentiate the emotionally learned from the emotionally unschooled.

There's a word for that, it's "manners". If you look for it on Wikipedia though, the preferred form is the French "etiquette". I guess we still look up to the French to tell us how to be polite.

Quoting Banno

It's also interesting that the result of the analysis seems to be the aggrandisement of what might be called the "cultivated soul". If emotions are a learned skill, we can differentiate the emotionally learned from the emotionally unschooled.

And that begins to look like a defence of middle class values; we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

Ah, but the question is how we treat the distinction; over the kind of power and rhetorical relations we set up in a society where people are differentially emotionally educated. There mere acknowledgement of this is not aggrandisement, no more than acknowledging the existence of the poor and uneducated is aggrandisement - indeed, the lack of acknowledgement would be the ultimate aggrandizing move, on behalf of some fabled 'middle-class' (if of course, 'the middle class' existed - which it doesn't. It's just a feint designed to break the solidarity of the working class, to which almost everyone belongs to).

But to your point of substance...

Quoting Banno

The trouble I have with this excellent analysis is that I'm not at al sure what a concept is.

So I might just note that concepts, if they are anything, are also action oriented. That is, the meaning of a concept is what you do with it.

For Barrett at least, a concept is something which categorizes sensations into seemingly discrete emotions (anger, fear, joy, etc). See also @fdrake's post here. The point of this categorisation (forming a 'concept' of anger, fear, joy, etc), is to help the 'body regulate itself, guide action, and guide perception'. More than this, a concept here is a prediction. It is a prediciton in the sense that it says something like: "anger is the best way to respond to this, and the emotion of anger will be the best suited to help me achieve what I want in this situation". To quote Barrett on this:

Barrett - The Theory of Constructed Emotion:"Traditionally, a ‘category’ is a population of events or objects that are treated as similar because they all serve a particular goal in some context; a ‘concept’ is the population of representations that correspond to those events or objects. I hypothesize that in assembling populations of predictions, each one having some probability of being the best fit to the current circumstances, the brain is constructing concepts... The brain uses emotion concepts to categorize sensations to construct an instance of emotion.

That is, the brain constructs meaning by correctly anticipating (predicting and adjusting to) incoming sensations. Sensations are categorized so that they are (i) actionable in a situated way and therefore (ii) meaningful, based on past experience. When past experiences of emotion (e.g. happiness) are used to categorize the predicted sensory array and guide action, then one experiences or perceives that emotion (happiness)."

So you're exactly right - the meaning of a concept is what you do with it; or as I said earlier - the meaning of an emotion (which is a concept!) is what you do with it. The thing to add here however, is the notion that a concept functions predicatively - it has an orienting function, and is constructed on the basis of feedback loops with respect to behaviour.

Reply to StreetlightX This... https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/1/2823712 ?

Reply to Banno Yeah that's the one. I can link you a copy if you'd like. That particular one is more brain-sciencey though. The more conceptual paper is her "Solving the Emotion Paradox" paper, which I think can be found with a Google search.

Quoting fdrake

Our behaviour itself, our emotions themselves, are a sample from the model, and "exactly what we do" is a collapsed down form, a representative summary, of the model's state given (its own representation of) a current goal (and our expectations of environmental/bodily behaviours).

Yes, that's right. The point I was trying to make above is that making any conceptual/verbal representation of this snapshot summary that we label with an emotional term is also a behaviour. So we're not just journal writing, we're not keeping a log of how we're feeling just for posterity, our drawing together a snapshot valuation of all our various emotion-related stimuli is itself an act which is part of the perceive>infer>respond>perceive(more closely) system. We're deliberately paying more attention to the contributory stimuli and deliberately trying to form a conceptual valuation of them in order to achieve some situational goal.

To put it more colloquially, we're not in some state we would term an emotion all the time (and just unaware of it). The act of terming a state and emotion is something we do in relation to some goal. Up to that point we simply have affect, no emotion at all. It's not something we discover about our state that was there all along, it's something we construct from the components of our state for some other purpose. That where the 'constructed' bit of constructed emotions comes from.

Quoting StreetlightX

the more conceptual paper is her "Solving the Emotion Paradox" paper, which I think can be found with a Google search.

Here, save you the trouble of typing it.

Reply to StreetlightX Reply to Isaac Cheers.

Reading.

Quoting jkg20

Indeed, much of it sounds like reheated Wittgenstein. Does she acknowledge the influence at least?

Of the three papers I've read, there's only one reference to Wittgenstein in connection with her use of the term 'family resemblance'. That said, this is alot more than reheated Wittgenstein - it elaborates and takes the idea into new and incredibly interesting directions. Thinking about concepts in terms of predictions, and then further linking those predictions in terms of bodily states and environmental feedback along with a whole invocation of Bayesian brains are all major renovations on the idea.

Moreover, I like that similar ideas can be arrived at from totally different paths - it makes an idea more robust, and allows for a greater extension of the concept into new and exciting areas. Also, Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist by profession, so I would not expect that the relevant philosophical literature is necessarily covered.

Quoting fdrake

I'm beginning to think that transcendental illusions are separate in character from the predictive errors spoken about in this approach; insofar as transcendental illusions are necessary failures of reason generated by its misapplication, I don't think they'd apply to the contingent error prone-ness of valuations. I'm not saying that there aren't transcendental illusions for emotion, but I can't see a neat way of linking the paper to the question I wrote to you (summarised: "Are there analogues of transcendental illusions in emotion?").

I've been trying to think about this and I think you're entirely right to think about this in terms of modality. I hope this is not a case of me just trying to curve-fit, but given how messy the production of emotions can be, would it not be the case of something like a necessary production of contingent valuation errors? Like, given the exigencies of bodily developmental history, the openness of context, the instability of (emotional) meaning (in Derridian terms one might speak here of a necessary play of différance involved in emotion), the overlapping patterns of cultural meaning, etc, etc - that in some sense, we're almost guaranteed to have errors crop up often.

In fact, even 'error' seems a bit of an 'off' way to talk about things. If the thesis is right, emotions provide not so much solutions to 'problems' so much as differential dispositional capacities that accentuate or diminish certain solution-tendencies over others (anger means I'm not going to try and sweet-talk the other guy - I'm going to shout at him!). In this sense we're talking of a 'good enough' fit, and never a 'perfect fit'. Emotions are always 'baggy' with respect to what they're invoked for (just being angry offers no guarantee that it'll 'fix' the problem). So there's always a kind of inherent instability that is 'necessary' for any one (or even mixed) emotional state.

Quoting Colin Cooper

We are born with emotions in place

This is a common view, but it is not one that seems to be substantiated by the evidence. To quote Barrett's review article:

Barrett - Are Emotions Natural Kinds?:A brief review of the emotion literature indicates that, even after 100 years of research, the scientific status of emotions as natural kinds remains surprisingly unclear. In every domain of emotion research, there is some evidence for the view that emotion categories like anger, sadness, and fear carve nature at its joints. But there is also steadily accumulating evidence against the natural-kind view. Strong correlations among self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures of emotion do not consistently materialize as expected, calling into question the idea that anger, sadness, fear, and so on are homeostatic property clusters that can be identified in observable data. It is difficult, if not impossible, to characterize any emotion category by a group of instances that resemble one another in their correlated properties. That is, it is difficult, if not impossible, to empirically identify the extensions of each emotion category.

Nor does the empirical record provide strong evidence for distinct causal mechanisms for each emotion. Emotion categories such as anger, sadness, and fear have thus far not clearly and consistently revealed themselves in the data on feelings, facial and vocal behaviors, peripheral nervous system responses, and instrumental behaviors. The jury is still out on whether there are distinct brain markers for each emotion, but so far the available evidence does not encourage a natural-kind view. An individual study here or there might produce evidence to distinguish between two or more emotions, but inconsistency in findings across studies is thus far the norm, and the specificity of correspondences between emotions and brain locations has not been adequately addressed.

Skim read it, I would like to be convinced it is worth spending more time on but on the basis of some of the things the author writes, I feel my time might be better spent reading something else:

People parse the world into things emotional and non emotional, and they further divide the emotional world into discrete categories.

Do they? What is parsing supposed to be here? I know what it means to parse a sentence, but parse the world? Do we just have a common place that people can have different emotional reactions, and sometimes no emotional reactions, to different events? Or are we supposed to already be buying into the idea that doing so involves systematic mechanisms? If the latter, where is the evidence for that position?

Emotions exist, but only as experiences.

Do they? I can have an emotional experience, but that doesn't entail emotion is an experience. It doesn't entail that it is any thing at all.

The author appears to want to undermine the idea that emotions are hidden mechanisms, but then much of what she says only makes sense against the background that they are internal mechanisms, just different from the kind that other scientists have proposed.

Specifically,the experience of feeling an emotion... occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is brought to bear during the act of categorization.

If emotions are not things, they cannot be felt in the sense she is talking about, but I don't see any evidence presented to convince that they are things.

Maybe I am just not subtle enough to understand psychology.

Reply to jkg20 Skim read closer!

"Like beliefs and memories, however, emotions are not things. They are states. ...The experience of emotion is not the result of an “inner eye” perceiving an object called “core affect.” Instead, it is probably more correct to say that both valuation and categorization processes change the state of the person to create an emergent product that is at once affective and conceptual" (p. 35)

The inner eye metaphor is quite a good one. I suspect it characterises quite nicely the 'spontaneous' approach to emotion that alot of people have.

Quoting fdrake

I'm beginning to think that transcendental illusions are separate in character from the predictive errors spoken about in this approach; insofar as transcendental illusions are necessary failures of reason generated by its misapplication, I don't think they'd apply to the contingent error prone-ness of valuations. I'm not saying that there aren't transcendental illusions for emotion, but I can't see a neat way of linking the paper to the question I wrote to you (summarised: "Are there analogues of transcendental illusions in emotion?").

Barrett refers in her book to what she calls ‘affective realism’, which I understand to be a misapplication similar to transcendental illusion:

Barrett, “How Emotions Are Made’:When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience about the world...In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. ‘I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person’. In my lab, when we manipulate people’s affect without their knowing, it influences whether they experience a stranger as trustworthy, competent, attractive, or likeable, and they even see the person’s face differently.

Quoting StreetlightX

Skim read closer!

:up:

Reply to StreetlightX Maybe I will, but I expect to find as much difficulty with the idea of an emotion being a state as I do with emotion being an experience. I can be in an emotional state, but that doesn't entail emotions are states.

Quoting jkg20

Maybe I will, but I expect to find as much difficulty with the idea of an emotion being a state as I do with emotion being an experience. I can be in an emotional state, but that doesn't entail emotions are states.

Where does it say that emotions are states?

Reply to Possibility Not sure, didn't catch that myself when I skim read, it was in the quotation cited by Streetlightx:

"Like beliefs and memories, however, emotions are not things. They are states. ...The experience of emotion is not the result of an “inner eye” perceiving an object called “core affect.” Instead, it is probably more correct to say that both valuation and categorization processes change the state of the person to create an emergent product that is at once affective and conceptual" (p. 35)

Can there be involuntary emotions, according to this theory?

Quoting StreetlightX

n fact, even 'error' seems a bit of an 'off' way to talk about things.

Yes, there is no reason to call this an "error", you could have stayed with difference. Difference is the active cause of evolution, so it wouldn't be appropriate to say that the same thing (difference) which is responsible for evolution can be called an error. That would be like assigning "error" to whatever it is that causes genetic difference in living beings. The real error might be cultivating one particular way as the 'correct' way.

Quoting StreetlightX

Moreover, I like that similar ideas can be arrived at from totally different paths - it makes an idea more robust, and allows for a greater extension of the concept into new and exciting areas.

This is interesting, because if true, it implies that there is such a thing as 'correct', but correct is validated by the end, rather than the means. If different paths, different ways (different means) are practised to reach the same end, it implies that the end itself is what is valued more. So you might assign some sort of correctness to the end itself.

We can draw an analogy with Wittgenstein's description of learning mathematics in PI. I'm very critical of this description because he assigns 'correct', and 'following a rule', to coming up with the right answer. But he completely neglects the process an individual uses in coming up with the right answer, describing this process as the actions of a machine. In reality, the process might be very individualistic, and even unique to the circumstances, so the phrase 'following a rule' ought to be assigned to that thought process (which might be completely different from the process which another person follows), by which the person comes up with the correct answer. As an example, check the different methods for long division. Of course the French would protect their way just to be different.

Now, in separating ends from means, we find that we can judge the differing means independently, in relation to the end. Some ways of reaching the same goal are much more efficient than others. So we judge them as better. This produces two distinct value systems, good (better or worse), which is judged of the means, and completely distinct from correct, or right, which is judged of the end.

Where this gets particularly interesting, and actually confusing, is that the particularity, or uniqueness of the end, in all its accidentals, is actually a function of being produced by particular, and differing means. This is in the sense that the effect is specific to the set of causes, and a difference in a cause will necessitate a difference in the effect. What I called the "same" goal is better described by StreetlightX's term "similar". So the end (which in the Streetlight's terms is the idea or concept), being arrived at by distinct methods, is "similar", but not the same; accepting this necessitates a rejection of Platonism. But this gives reason to be skeptical of the correctness of the end. And as Aristotle described in his Nichomachean Ethics, the end turns out to be nothing more than the means to another end, which is the means to a further end, etc., unless we assign an ultimate end like 'happiness', which is somewhat arbitrary.

Quoting StreetlightX

I've been trying to think about this and I think you're entirely right to think about this in terms of modality. I hope this is not a case of me just trying to curve-fit, but given how messy the production of emotions can be, would it not be the case of something like a necessary production of contingent valuation errors? Like, given the exigencies of bodily developmental history, the openness of context, the instability of (emotional) meaning (in Derridian terms one might speak here of a necessary play of différance involved in emotion), the overlapping patterns of cultural meaning, etc, etc - that in some sense, we're almost guaranteed to have errors crop up often.

Maybe one way of condensing Barrett's points about errors is that they are more like infelicities of speech acts; in the regard that promoted actions (including attaining a specific emotional state) can be in reality unlikely to aid in achieving the goal , or that the evidential basis that furnishes the body's inferential transformation into an emotional state is flawed; accessing the wrong information (like an error of context) or drawing the wrong heuristic, aleatory and associational conclusions based on mechanisms of association that do not track the associations of the phenomenon in question. All these types of misfits leverage exploratory information about one's body and its relationship to its environment (representation of their joint causal structure in terms of salient task oriented features). These are errors the process of active inference can make in its course.

What I'm thinking of as a transcendental illusion would perhaps be a flaw in the process itself; whether there is some mechanical failure in the process of active inference that makes it attempt to exceed its bounds. Perhaps the one thing I can recall that resembles this in "The Emotion Paradox" paper is the enduring error that people have distinct states like "anger", "sadness", "joy" which behave like natural kinds. Even then, we can think otherwise from these. So perhaps a transcendental illusion in this context would be an enduring or widespread heuristic bias that the machine of active inference is likely to pick up (on a population level), and even then they could not easily be distinguished from cultural effects. But perhaps, if we constrained the discussion to tendencies of active inference that will always be infelicitous, and arise from nothing more than how the process works in itself (as in, how it works as a mechanism of prediction/association independent of its content), maybe these infelicities are close to the idea.

A "true" transcendental illusion, a reapplication of Kant's doctrine, would in my mind be an inescapable tendency of this process to confuse its representations of causal structures (given a goal) with the causal structures themselves. And that's partly what the models outputted from the active inference machine are for anyway, and have it as an inbuilt feature (the "raw data", like a body's true heart rate, ambient temperature etc, is summarised in a way that makes the active inference machine depend only upon a representative summary of the raw data when promoting actions). This isn't so much as a reapplication of the doctrine of transcendental illusion, but a restatement of it in another context (maybe). We actively infer in a manner where the true propensities of the world's development given our interventions and goals are (ideally) closely approximated by our predictions given those same interventions (and we weight discrepancies/imprecisions/mismatches highly in the process to maintain allostasis).

Quoting fdrake

...the machine of active inference...

Uh uh.

Reply to StreetlightX

StreetlightX!

Have you considered metaphysical Voluntarism? Meaning, the intellect is subordinate to the Will, hence:

St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the intellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect determines the will, since we can desire only what we know. Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know.

I myself fall into the Voluntarist camp. The Will and emotions come before intellect/your idea of concepts. The Will is an unconscious urge and/or innate energy force in consciousness and/or the universe.

Reply to StreetlightX So what does it tell us when someone can not learn a emotion ? Empathy for example .
"Note that a character who lacks empathy can still be perfectly capable of cognitive empathy; that is, the ability to recognise and identify an emotion — they might not be able to share in somebody's happiness or sadness, but they have learnt well enough what happiness or sadness looks like"

So if you can no teach or learn a emotion because of a chemical unbalance we were born with , does that not suggest emotions are something we are born with , or not ? They can not learn empathy because the right ingredients are not there , or , because the correct ingredients are not there , empathy emotion can not develop ? . Personally I believe both point to emotions being something build into us rather then just learned during life .
The Garden of Eden was a peaceful place until someone ate the apple , releasing the bad emotions , I find this story interesting . So they believed we only had good emotions at one time ? I am aware its meant to be a tale of Evil at work in tempting man , but still the whole reasoning behind these stories is interesting , does it say we learned the emotions , or giving the emotion ?
So if we learn emotions to help us survive , how did we survive in the first place ? if we could not defend ourselves because we had not learned the emotion of fear , or anger then I doubt we would of getting very far in our evolution . Fear must be a very old emotion , I have no doubt this emotion is felt by just about every animal , and from a very early stage . It triggers adrenaline which helps to make us stronger or faster . Did every new species need to learn and evolve these emotions ? or were they passed down from the first beginnings of life ? We are conscious of our emotions , whereas a sheep simply reacts to the emotion , but I believe we share the base primal emotions in reality .

Quoting 3017amen

I myself fall into the Voluntarist camp. The Will and emotions come before intellect/your idea of concepts. The Will is an unconscious urge and/or innate energy force in consciousness and/or the universe.

Very Schopenhaurian of you! :grin:

Quoting Colin Cooper

So what does it tell us when someone can not learn a emotion? Personally I believe both point to emotions being something build into us rather then just learned during life

It's an interesting question - I imagine that there must indeed be certain neurological features, which, when underdeveloped or malformed, inhibit the bodily instantiation of an empathy concept or something similar. But this doesn't pose an objection to the account of emotion given here. That certain neural features must be in place is not something the account denies. In fact it is premised on the development of very specific neural structures that enable emotions to be expressed in the way they are. In any case the rest of your post simply repeats your previous ones. As it is, I'll stick to the science rather than tales about the Garden of Eden and so fourth.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Very Schopenhaurian of you! :grin:

Indeed Scop1 :up:

And from a 'physics' view of the meta-physical, it would be known as the problem of 'informational energy' or emergence acting upon [all] matter produced from the sentient mind.

But indeed, the Will is quite a mysterious thing. Otherwise, animal instinct and other encoded/emergent properties is all that is necessary for sentient existence :snicker: .

LOL, as you were !

Quoting fdrake

Maybe one way of condensing Barrett's points about errors is that they are more like infelicities of speech acts

Ahhh of course! I'm kicking myself for not having thought of that! Felicitous and infelicitous emotions - of course. This way of thinking allows one to bring in the whole philosophical machinery of speech-act theory and the question of repetition and novelty.... Just to spit out some thoughts: there's the whole question of the 'publicness' of speech-acts, the fact that not just any speech-act will be felicitous, and that certain conditions need to be in place. Which here corresponds to the fact that the criteria that identify emotion and never wholly your own, and anger is a script, or set of scripts (the language of 'scripts of anger' that Barrett uses is incredibly interesting!), which again has the beautiful effect of turning the topology of emotion inside-out, making the most intimate public, and the public, intimate.

And then you have the 'subversive' readings of speech act theory (Derrida, Butler), where speech-acts have the capacity function to transform the context out of which they are birthed (the reclamation of certain slurs, for instance) which, when thought about in terms of emotion, brings a whole different ethical and political dimension into it. I'm thinking things like - subversive reactions - laughing at a threat; anger at a joke; impassivity among celebration, each of which can be invoked to short-circuit the emotional logic of a particular situation (respectively: "you can't hurt me at all"/"that's a terrible joke at that person's expense"/"this is not something to celebrate"): emotion as a transformative act, or means of transformation.

Quoting fdrake

So perhaps a transcendental illusion in this context would be an enduring or widespread heuristic bias that the machine of active inference is likely to pick up (on a population level), and even then they could not easily be distinguished from cultural effects.

This makes a great deal of sense too. I can't help but think about this in terms of Deleuze's account of the confusion of process for product - of identities as primary with respect to the differences which in fact gave rise to them ('tracing the transcendental from the empirical'). Here I think you're right: it's the projection of emotions as natural kinds (as origins) which are then subsequently expressed which just is the most 'natural' illusion par excellence.

This makes sense on Kant's terms too: transcendental illusions arise when the faculties of intelligibility are not limited by the conditions of sensibility and claim to bear upon 'thing-in-themselves'. Barrett's account has a very similar sensibility/intelligibility split and here you can kind of talk about the application of concepts (so Kantian already in it's language!) working independently of the conditions of sensibility ('core affect'!) and 'going rogue', as it were, but nonetheless ascribing the formation of a emotion-concept to emerging wholly from 'within' the emotional subject. The 'illusion' to constantly ward off - and to which we will always return - is the ascription of emotion as wholly personal, as brute, visceral eruption (to counter: invoke Spinoza's third form of knowledge).

Quoting 3017amen

Have you considered metaphysical Voluntarism? Meaning, the intellect is subordinate to the Will

I have very little positive to say about 'the will', so I'm afraid I don't have much to say about it in connection with the OP at all.

Quoting Luke

Can there be involuntary emotions, according to this theory?

I'm not entirely clear about how volition fits into the picture here, if at all. I think Barrett does have alot to say about it in her book, but I haven't yet read it. Maybe @Possiblity can shed some light here? At this point, I think I can say this: it's less a question of whether emotions are voluntary or not (they arise at the intersection of some very complex and layered bio-social interactions and processes) so much as how one goes about relating to one's emotions. Insofar as emotions are, to a certain degree, impersonal and public (they are responses to environmental situations), it's a question of adjusting that mode of response.

Check out the talk below where she talks about means of 'transforming one's emotional life' and 'being the architect of your experience'. What complicates the question of 'voluntarism' is that such means require, as it were, habituation, training, and learning. The voluntarism here isn't a kind of spontaneous 'I can feel whatever I want" but more a result of long and engaged processes of emotional discipline and training (which I really like as an idea: discipline as a condition of freedom). It also provides a nice summary of her account in general, perhaps better for those who don't want to wade through the walls of writing here:

We are in a sense at the mercy of our predictions, but we can endeavor to change our predictions or deliberately condition ourselves in particular ways.

Reply to StreetlightX The Garden of Eden is only a interesting observation of how we have try to understand ourselves . The fact we need certain neurological features to enable the emotion , makes me believe this is not by accident , rather the features are there by design to allow emotions , we do not learn these emotions . What are emotions , there true reason and not the one our conscious mind is trying to make sense off . If we share the same emotion of fear as a sheep does , at what point in evolution did we share that same development ? or did the sheep in its evolution merely developed the same "emotion" as we did independently of each other ? Our arrogance that we created and learned emotions is not surprising . Even the word itself is merely our way of trying to consciously understand and label something , emotions were around a long time before we put a name to it . Do we fully understand emotions ? I very much doubt it . But considering it is a system developed to protect , survive and thrive I firmly believe "emotions " were around a long time before Humans . Lets take sex emotions , we all know what its like for Dogs when a Bitch is in heat :) one tracked mind for the dogs , any competition and they attack . Our behaviour is exactly the same in reality , despite our intelligence or civilisation . We do not learn how to be jealousy , its a natural instinct you find in nearly all animals . If our emotions are learned by our mind why do we still kill each other , why are we still so selfish , if we are learning emotions then we would of learned how to not hate and live peacefully a long time ago . But we do not learn . why?

Reply to Colin Cooper

Great point (quite Existential I must say), subscribed!!!!

Reply to fdrake Reply to StreetlightX

You might have already read this one already given your interest, but reading you two talk about language (I'm afraid much of which is going over my head) reminded me that Barrett did write a paper on language and emotion which might touch on some of what you're thinking about (or possibly be completely unrelated, but you might find it interesting nonetheless).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225544/#!po=37.6923

I'm leery, and perhaps weary (because I'm lazy?), of attempts at definition in this instance. Inclined as I am to think, with Dewey, that when it comes to emotion "the mode of behavior is the primary thing" and that emotions "emerge" from the connection (interaction really) between us and the rest of the world, I wonder whether we can usefully do anything more by way of definition than through consideration of how what we call emotions manifest themselves to the extent that they or the experience of them can be described. That may be due to the insufficiency of language. Even then I think definition will be vague and general, due to the fact they result in different circumstances and would vary in degree or character depending on the circumstances and the nature of the interaction.

I don't pretend to say anything regarding neuroscience (if that's the correct reference), but speculate that this may be a case where something like Pierce's "pragmatic maxim" would be useful. In its most famous or infamous form, the maxim states: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. "Practical bearings" for me in this case would be what we can discern takes place (which would include what we feel as well as what we do, how we look, etc.).

I see someone posted some presentation regarding not being a slave to our emotions. Intelligent reflection on how, when and why our emotions manifest themselves is I think one of the bases of Stoicism, which is in turn one of he bases of CBT.

Well, after more than a skim read I see where the real problem with all this lies for me. Let's start with the first three sentences of the article:

Humans experience emotion. For many, experience serves as an emotion’s central and defining aspect. We feel the heat of anger, the despair of sadness, the dread of fear..

So, how about those who are not among this supposed "many" and who might, I presume reasonably, ask the question: when I am angry, do I experience my anger? According to the author we always do, since her opening sentence is never really put up for challenge.
Granted, "I have never experienced so much anger" might make sense and could mean:
1 "I have never seen anyone so angry before"
2 "I have never felt so angry before"

Most of the focus, although not all, is on reading 2. The implication throughout the article seems to be that every time I feel a certain way requires that there be something being felt, whether you use the term "state" to denote that thing or otherwise, and that the issue is how to scientifically analyse that thing. Does that principle generalise, though? Sure, everytime I write a certain way requires there is something I am writing. But, does every time I sleep a certain way require that there is something I am sleeping? Does every time I yawn a certain way require that there is something I am yawning? Somebody might point out that we do talk of "sleeping the sleep of the just", and one can "give a yawn" but these are just metaphors, you can't pass round the sleep of the just as you would a bottle of sleeping pills, and you cannot donate yawns to charity.

Of course, physiologists might have lots of interesting things to say about what happens to the body whilst a human being sleeps, or yawns but that doesn't entail that what they are describing is sleeping or yawning.

Her summary of the faults she finds in others is conlcuded in these few words:

the empirical evidence supports two conclusions about the study and measurement of emotion experience. First,the experience of emotion cannot be measured objectively. Second, discrete emotion experiences are not psychologically primitive.

This might lead a sceptical scientist, and should there really be any other kind, to suspect that there is no such thing as what is being referred to as "emotion experience" at all. Yet the author happily proceeds to give her own theory of precisely these things. At one point it is said

Emotions exist, but only as experiences.

Shortly afterwards we have the phrase

the experience of feeling an emotion

So not only do we experience emotions now, we also experience our feeling an emotion. How do we do that? I can feel angry, can I also experience that feeling? Would it make any difference if I did not?

"In psychology there is experimental method and conceptual confusion."

Guess who said that.

Quoting jkg20

So not only do we experience emotions now, we also experience our feeling an emotion. How do we do that? I can feel angry, can I also experience that feeling? Would it make any difference if I did not?

I really don't understand your objection. Like, what is your actual point? That we don't always experience emotion? Thay emotion is somehow unreal? Not sure what to make of your rhetorical questions.

Reply to jkg20
Well, that doesn't really work, though, does it? The author doesn't speak of experiencing the anger of anger, or the sadness of sadness, or the fear of fear. Why then think that the claim is being made that when someone is angry they experience anger?

I admit that I wasn't aware someone could "give a yawn."

Reply to StreetlightX Thanks for the reply. To try and clarify the intent of my question, you appeared to be suggesting in the OP that the "classical view of emotion" had been (or could be) superseded by Barrett's view of emotions as a skill or a tool, e.g., where emotions can be used as an intentional response to a bully. I was wondering whether Barrett's view actually supersedes and replaces the classical view, or whether some aspects of the classical view could be retained. One aspect of the classical view I had in mind, in particular, was overwhelming emotions, and/or becoming emotional involuntarily or unexpectedly (to oneself). It seemed to me that @Hanover was possibly hinting at the same thing with his example of the emotions of a newborn crying baby.

Some relevant quotes from Barrett that I gleaned from the video:

Emotions...are not universally expressed and recognised. They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable.

Barrett states the above near the start of the video. At first, I thought she was going to continue to state that emotions are completely within our control, to be used as tools, as the OP suggests. But towards the end of the video, she says:

I am not suggesting to you that you can just perform a couple of Jedi mind tricks and then talk yourself out of being depressed or anxious or any kind of serious condition. But I am telling you that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine, and that you have the capacity to turn down the dial on emotional suffering and its consequences for your life by learning how to construct your experiences differently.

This indicates a weaker claim that we can control our emotions to some extent, but not completely. I take it from this that overwhelming emotions, and at least part of classical view, remains intact.

Quoting Luke

I take it from this that overwhelming emotions, and at least part of classical view, remains intact.

No. The classical theory is that stimuli put the brain into a recognisable state (which can be labelled a particular emotion) which then either causes, or makes more likely, a particular set of responses. It's a one way process and the recognition of that state (by either yourself or an outside observer) is simply and act of journalism, just noting what is the case.

The trouble is there's no evidence that this is the case. None of the states we talk about (anger, fear, jealousy...) can be recognised physiologically, we do not reliably report the same physiological states in each of these categories and neither do outside observers.

Barrett's theory is that the emotional state of the brain is no less a part of the active inference model of cognitive process than, say, perception is. Stimuli put a part of our brain into a certain state. Higher order parts of the brain then try to predict the reason why these lower order parts are in the state they're in. That prediction acts as both a forward-acting imperative (creates behaviour) and a backward-acting suppressor (tunes out conflicting data). The forward-acting imperative is some behaviour solely designed to help this part of the brain confirm or deny it's prediction. This process then continues with the lower part of the brain now being put into a new state resulting from stimuli caused by the actions the higher part of the brain just initiated.

(I'm using lower and higher here as hierarchical terms, it's nothing to do with animal/rational, or basic/advanced as these terms are often used to mean)

So emotion is a model of some higher order part of the brain to explain the state of several lower order parts of the brain in response to stimuli, then to initiate some action to both filter results assuming that model is the case and to interact with the environment in such a way as to confirm that model.

This explains why there's no strictly applicable physiological signatures to our emotions, one model only need be sufficient to predict a cause of the stimuli and initiate action to better predict that cause, it need not act as a filing system sorting those causes into reliable categories.

The 'labelling' of these stimuli as being in an emotional category, is itself one of the actions the second order part of the brain is carrying out to either firm-up or cast aside its inference model. The labelling itself acts as a filter/action initiator alongside other actions.

I've oversimplified that a lot just to try and get a short overview, hopefully the main point still carries.

The ability to control our emotions in some ways is a side-effect of the fact that third order parts of our brain are also using active inference models to predict why those second order parts are in the state they're in (have the models they have). we can use the backward-acting responses from these to interfere with or constrain the models they choose.

When we can't control our emotions is then a matter of there being no access (no circuitry) between the second order part of the brain and the actions it initiates. It doesn't have any impact on Barrett's theory which is about the indeterminacy of emotional states (and the reasons why they are indeterminate).

For involuntary emotional responses the two theories would look like this;

Classic - Stimuli (I stub my toe) > emotion (anger) > unavoidable response (I yell obscenities)

Active Inference - Stimuli (I stub my toes) > several lower order neural circuits are put into various states (pain, adrenal response, muscle contractions...) > a second order circuit uses the model 'anger' to predict the cause of the states of all these lower order circuits (some external threat is hurting me) and sends out action initiators to yell obscenities(frighten off the external state) > no third order circuit interferes with these action initiators (I yell obscenities) > the first order circuits report the response of the environment to my actions (the pain stopped) > the second order circuit either updates its model according the amount of errors deviating from its expectations, or suppresses deviant information (all good - I yelled at the cause of pain and the pain went away - well done me).

Reply to StreetlightX

Like, what is your actual point? That we don't always experience emotion?

Nearly but not quite. More like "We don't always have emotion experiences, even when we are being emotional."

Imagine you played a madness game, 'they're hot and I'm not' where players who are hot headed are to appear on radar.

In this analogy, an emotional state activates an effect. It also shows the competitive scene where more anger occurs than sadness; reiterrating my post earlier, 'we gain different amounts of energy' - playing this game - it's scene. Our emotions cycle differently depending on habitat.

Perhaps though a greater reading is due. Lesser to call it angry than to interpret it wordlessly. I know, he is - (is it angry I insert here?) - probably not.

Quoting jkg20

We don't always have emotion experiences, even when we are being emotional.

Then how do we know we're being emotional?

Quoting jkg20

"We don't always have emotion experiences, even when we are being emotional."

It's hard to know what to make of this. Perhaps you can elaborate.

Reply to StreetlightX There is not muh too it really. I'm simply expressing some scepticism that, psychologically, there is anything systematic and appropriate for scientific investigation going on when people exhibit emotional behaviour.

Quoting jkg20

There is not muh too it really. I'm simply expressing some scepticism that, psychologically, there is anything systematic and appropriate for scientific investigation going on when people exhibit emotional behaviour.

On what grounds? And how does that relate to what you said before?

Reply to StreetlightX On what grounds? The vast variety of ways of displaying anger and other emotions. Why assume there is some one thing in common with them all? I have never seen a convincing argument to establish that there must be. The burden of proof here is on those who think there is.

Quoting jkg20

The vast variety of ways of displaying anger and other emotions. Why assume there is some one thing in common with them all?

Huh? This is exactly what the paper argues against??

p.33:
As a consequence, situated conceptualizations of anger are heterogeneous. Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualization for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many. On any given occasion, the content of a situated conceptualization for anger will be constructed to contain mainly those properties of anger that are contextually relevant, and it therefore contains only a small subset of the knowledge available in long-term memory about the category anger.

The situation, then, will largely determine which representation of anger will be constructed to conceptualize a state of core affect, with the result that the experience of anger (or of any emotion) will be sculpted by the situation. This idea is, in principle, consistent with the fundamental assumption of appraisal views of emotion: The meaning of a situation to a particular person at a particular point in time is related to the emotion that is experienced.

This is the 2nd time you've made an objection based on something the paper directly disavows. That emotions are 'natural kinds' with unifying features is the biggest target of the account which it aims to dismantle at every point. I'm beginning to think you haven't read it at all, or if you have, you haven't understood much, if any of it.

So the author agress with me that there is nothing systematic and appropriate for psychological investigation? Why not just say that then, instead of presenting an alternative account of what is involved in that systematicity? For instance, when she writes

The situation, then, will largely determine which representation of anger will be constructed to conceptualize a state of core affect

why assume that there is any representation going on at all when one is angry?

Reply to jkg20 It's not an assumption, it's the basis of the account being given. Again this is pretty basic stuff - I no longer think it wise to take you seriously on this unless you demonstrate your understanding.

Reply to StreetlightX By "the basis of the account being given" I presume you are referring to the author's positive account of what is going on, and not the account which she is attacking? If that is so, then the basis of her account is that each time there is emotional behaviour there is a representation of the emotion. I reject that basis on the grounds that I see no reason for believing that every time a person feels an emotion they must be representing anything at all. Why is that a misunderstanding of her position?

It might of course be a misunderstanding on my part of the notions of representation and representing, but I won't get any clarification on that point from that article.

If self-reports of emotion experience have any validity at all, then when projected into geometric space, those reports should exhibit a simple structure (Thurstone, 1935), with one factor each for anger, sad- ness, fear, and so on. This would provide evidence that each kind of emotion is associated with an experiential primitive feeling, meaning that the feeling cannot be broken down into component parts or reduced to any- thing else psychological. If self-reports fail to show simple structure, then this can be taken as evidence that those reports are not valid.

But I think we already knew that, didn't we? A report is not an expression. Don't believe me when I say I am angry, believe the smack in the gob. What we used to call a few years ago a 'fight or flight response' is a physiological call to action which is named after the event 'anger' or 'fear' according to the direction of the action taken. Experience is conceptualised after the event, necessarily so. Not experiences at all, but confabulated justifications of otherwise inexplicable behaviour. "I smacked you in the gob because I was angry - it must have been like that."

Quoting Possibility

Barrett refers in her book to what she calls ‘affective realism’, which I understand to be a misapplication similar to transcendental illusion:

That's very cool. I think I might have to pick up that book. Thank you.

Reply to Isaac

Will have a read of that tomorrow, and will try to make a post about that "infelicity" thing regarding it. If you wanted to read about it, IEP talks about Austin's use of the term; it's a more general failure/unsuccess category than "right" or "wrong", and he applies it to speech acts. My motivation for using it was to stress that goal/task relevance acts as a constraint in active inference, the "failures" we have with it are also rooted in comparisons to what we're trying to do.

A manager whose only mode of negotiating is angry discipline is being "infelicitous" in the sense I was using it; contrary to their goal in reality, signalling a predictive failure they will not recognise or their heuristics do not deem relevant.

Quoting 3017amen

St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the intellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect determines the will, since we can desire only what we know. Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know.

Actually, Aquinas says that in the absolute sense, will is prior to intellect. If not, the will could not be free. Also if this were not the case, we could not account for the dilemma which Socrates exposed, Plato faced, and Augustine expounded. This is the fact that a man can do what he knows is wrong.

Quoting jkg20

why assume that there is any representation going on at all when one is angry?

Well folks seem to get angry, and we talk about anger. So we represent it. But I rather agree with you if you are saying that the startling insights of neurobabble have been once again contrasted with a straw man of primitive ignorance. Let's just say that it would be an unnecessary distraction for one who is angry to be experiencing an inner state at all, let alone conceptualising it, and he would be better employed directing the fist to the face. And it is in retrospect that he declares his anger as some-internal-thing that provoked the blow. To experience oneself emotionally is to be divided from oneself.

I wonder how this kind of insight could be related to the incontrovertible neurofacts?

Why is one angry? Because one is hurt, someone has said an unkind thing; and when someone says a flattering thing you are pleased. Why are you hurt? Self-importance, is it not? And why is there self-importance? Because one has an idea, a symbol of oneself, an image of oneself, what one should be, what one is or what one should not be. Why does one create an image about oneself? Because one has never studied what one is, actually. We think we should be this or that, the ideal, the hero, the example. What awakens anger is that our ideal, the idea we have of ourselves, is attacked. And our idea about ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we are. But when you are observing the actual fact of what you are, no one can hurt you. Then, if one is a liar and is told that one is a liar it does not mean that one is hurt; it is a fact. But when you are pretending you are not a liar and are told that you are, then you get angry, violent. So we are always living in an ideational world, a world of myth and never in the world of actuality.

source

Quoting StreetlightX

Can there be involuntary emotions, according to this theory?
— Luke

I'm not entirely clear about how volition fits into the picture here, if at all. I think Barrett does have alot to say about it in her book, but I haven't yet read it. Maybe Possiblity can shed some light here? At this point, I think I can say this: it's less a question of whether emotions are voluntary or not (they arise at the intersection of some very complex and layered bio-social interactions and processes) so much as how one goes about relating to one's emotions.

Barrett refers in her book to ‘the illusion of a two-system brain’: with an emotional, instinctive side kept in check or controlled by a rational, thinking side. She notes flawed experimental design for helping perpetuate this fiction by disrupting the brain’s natural process of non-stop prediction in psychological laboratory tests, breaking the dependency of brain states on those that came before, so that it looks like the brain responds automatically first and then makes a ‘choice’ later. Neuroscience, however, shows that thinking and feeling are not distinct in the brain, and that there is an important distinction between volition and awareness of volition.

FB - ‘How Emotions Are Made’:Anger is a population of diverse instances, not a single automatic reaction in the true sense of the phrase. The same holds for every other category of emotion, cognition, perception, and other type of mental event. It might seem like your brain has a quick, intuitive process and a slower, deliberative one, and that the former is more emotional and the latter more rational, but this idea is not defensible on neuroscience or behavioural grounds.

FB:Reflexes in your peripheral nervous system have sensory neurons wired directly to motor neurons. We call the resulting actions ‘involuntary’ because there is one, and only one, specific behaviour for specific sensory stimulation due to direct wiring.
Your brain, however, is not wired like a reflex. If it were, you’d be at the mercy of the world, like a sea anemone that reflexively stabs whatever fish happens to brush up against its tentacles. The anemone’s sensory neurons, which receive input from the world, are directly connected to its motor neurons for movement. It has no volition.
A human brain’s sensory and motor neurons, however, communicate through intermediaries, called association neurons, and they endow your nervous system with a remarkable ability: decision-making. When an association neuron receives a signal from a sensory neuron, it has not one possible action but two. It can stimulate or inhibit a motor neuron. Therefore, the same sensory input can yield different outcomes on different occasions. This is the biological basis of choice, that most precious of human possessions. Thanks to association neurons, if a fish brushes against your skin, you can react with indifference, laughter, violence, or anything in between. You might feel like a sea anemone at times, but you have much more control over your harpoon than you think.
Your brain’s control network, which helps select your actions, is composed of association neurons. This network is always engaged, actively selecting your actions; you just don’t always feel in control. In other words, your experience of being in control is just that - an experience.
...Scientists are still trying to figure out how the brain creates the experience of having control. But one thing is certain: there is no scientific justification for labeling a ‘moment without awareness of control’ as emotion.
...Emotions are not temporary deviations from rationality... They are not even your reactions to the world. They are your constructions of the world. Instances of emotion are no more out of control than thoughts or perceptions or beliefs or memories. The fact is, you construct many perceptions and experiences and you perform many actions, some that you control a lot and some that you don’t.

:up:

Well folks seem to get angry, and we talk about anger. So we represent it. But I rather agree with you if you are saying that the startling insights of neurobabble have been once again contrasted with a straw man of primitive ignorance.

You have put pithily exactly what I was trying, but obviously failing, to put across. I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I believe we never represent anger, and if that is the impression I gave, I apologise for not being clearer. As a matter of fact I also think that sometimes, in very specific circumstances, it also makes sense to say that we are confronted with representations of our own anger.

Edit : although where you use the term "neurobabble" my preference would be for "psychobabble", or perhaps both.

Quoting StreetlightX

Moreover, I like that similar ideas can be arrived at from totally different paths - it makes an idea more robust, and allows for a greater extension of the concept into new and exciting areas.

Quoting fdrake

..the machine of active inference..

These two descriptions are incompatible. If there is a multitude of different processes which might derive a similar idea, we cannot describe this process (inference) as a machine. And, due to the uniqueness and particularities of circumstances, it is more realistic to assume that an idea is never arrived at in the same way. Therefore we cannot describe inference in mechanistic terms.

Some semioticians might veil this fact, gloss it over, or hide it under equivocation because there is a cross-over of terminology in systems jargon. However, the habits of a living being are completely distinct from the workings of an inanimate machine because the living being creates a unique situation with each response to circumstances, what we call difference, thereby understanding through reference to difference; while the machine is designed on principles of similarity.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

This is the fact that a man can do what he knows is wrong.

MU!

Can you elucidate a bit more on that?

My interpretation of Will is that it is dumb, blind, emotive force that causes us to exist. In a humanistic existential context, it would be the Will to live and not commit suicide, for example. In other words as apposed to instinct, we have an intrinsic need to live and feel happy. In an ontological way, it is our need to be. We want to feel happy; it is our way of Being.

And in that sense, the OP question becomes, like Colin Cooper's post suggested, we don't learn emotions. Another example (from Colin's post) one could add to the mix of things, is the emotive feeling and phenomenon of listening to music. We don't learn the initial emotional experience when listening to same. Nor do we understand what biological advantages that has to our species. When we hear it, we like it; it feels good to us.

Emotions themselves are not concepts. Our will to listen to music (jazz, rock, country, classical, bebop) confers no biological advantages to our species. Same with Love. (Lower life forms utilize instinct and emergent properties genetically coded to procreate.) The will (and choice) to love someone, listen to music, or any (higher order) emotional phenomenon is an innate feature of higher consciousness.

What is the nature of this feeling to satisfy those existential needs, is my question to Streetlightx. Reply to StreetlightX

I've downloaded some of Barrett's papers and will try to understand them, but for now I am confused. The OP seemed to indicate that we were in conscious control of our emotions, e.g. saying that emotions are the "outcome of an evaluative process", which e.g. could be used to deter a bully. This motivated my question of whether there were any involuntary emotions, or emotions out of our control. However, recent posts by @Isaac and @Possibility seem to indicate that Barrett's theory of emotions is an entirely unconscious or involuntary view of what's happening 'under the hood'. If this is right, then how does our conscious feeling of emotions tie into this?

Reply to jkg20 "Emotions" are not spiritual or mental states . We are conscious of our emotions , but a Unconscious mind only reacts to "emotions" . We have a developed a second , conscious mind in evolution , which questions everything , which tries to make sense of everything for us , including "emotions" . In reality "emotions" and "consciousness" are Organic ,Neurons ,electrochemical and who knows what else . But it is not in reality spiritual or even mental states . What we call emotions is something that more then likely was developed very early in the beginnings of life . In fact we probably underestimate just how important "emotions " really are in the development of life , more then likely because of our arrogance that only humans really feel "emotions" . Our conscious mind is a pretty unique evolution step , the fact that it is capable of questioning its very own existence is amazing .You could say we are what a AI would be like if it developed consciousness . Can we develop consciousness within technology ? Yes , we will one day , once we understand more of how it actually works , which we will in time , I believe our conscious mind will eventually evolve as by its nature , it drives evolution itself .
The more we question the more we will evolve , which never stands still .One day I believe our conscious mind will learn how to control the unconscious mind , if you look you will see people have been trying and doing this already . Imagine if we could control the unconscious with the conscious . Turn pain on or off , tell our antibodies what to attack and what not to , could we even stop decay and death itself with control of our unconscious mind ?

Sorry , I am going of on a one :))) But I do believe the way we have evolved the 2 minds is amazing . One theory is its the development of the Human eye and the way it sees that enabled the development of a Conscious mind . Makes sense , its all about how we perceive things .Fascinating stuff :)

Quoting Luke

The OP seemed to indicate that we were in conscious control of our emotions, e.g. saying that emotions are the "outcome of an evaluative process", which e.g. could be used to deter a bully.

Ah, apologies if my OP gave off that impression, which, on review, probably does. Was trying to condense alot of info into a few short paragraphs and the qualification that the evaluative process in question was mostly non-conscious was something I probably should have added. As to your question - 'how does our conscious feeling of emotions tie into this?', I think the answer is that conscious feeling makes available additional cognitive resources in order to evaluate one's situation, specifically resources like language ("I am feeling angry") and general rational reflexivity ("should I be feeling angry?"). On a quick skim through of the papers I've read the closest I found was this:

"The experience of emotion is presumed to emerge when the feeling state is attended to, whether by deliberate introspection, or because the feeling state has rapid onset or intensity." (Solving, p.3).

I think though that the language of 'constraint' that Barrett and her colleagues use in her short paper on language that @Issac posted is useful: insofar as emotions are largely ambiguous and 'uncertain' (or as I prefer to say, differential) in their significance, and become more and more individuated on the basis of context (i.e the same feeling may be emotionally experienced as anger in one context, grief in another), consciousness and language help provide additional context. Here is Barrett et. al. on language: "emotion words (with associated conceptual content) that become accessible serve to reduce the uncertainty that is inherent in most natural facial behaviours and constrain their meaning to allow for quick and easy perceptions of emotion." The very act of calling an emotion anger serves to help individuate it, and alter body states (remember: emotion functions as a prediction about the best distribution of bodily resources).

In the same manner, if conscious feeling allows for prolonged consideration of emotion (over time periods longer than the largely 'automatic' mirco-temporality of brain processes: see the distinction that @possibility worte of between the two-levels of brain processing - quick/intuitive and slow/deliberative), then the 'rise to consciousness' is effectively the provision of more sustained context-making resources in order to better make emotion-predictions, or indeed, 'purely' rational ones ("I'm thoroughly pissed off at you at the moment, but it's in my interests to not punch you in your face"). This last but is somewhat speculative on my part (again, perhaps Barrett addresses this more in her book), but is motivated by Barrett's hypothesis the emotions are part of the brain's architecture which helps it "regulate your autonomic nervous system, your immune system and your endocrine system as resources are spent in seeking and securing more resources" ("The theory of constructed emotion").

Quoting Colin Cooper

but a Unconscious mind only reacts to "emotions" . We have a developed a second , conscious mind in

Are you suggesting that emotions determine what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know? And would that square with the notion that the primitive limbic system somehow precedes the intellect?

Quoting 3017amen

Non intelligunt, vos can re publica quaestio ?

My Latin's very spotty. It seems someone doesn't understand something, and some sort of proceeding on acts against the public interest. That's the best I can do.

Reply to Ciceronianus the White

Hahaha, indeed Cici !!!

Reply to 3017amen "Are you suggesting that emotions determine what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know? And would that square with the notion that the primitive limbic system somehow precedes the intellect? "

A very interesting perception and observation . Not one I thought about until now . Yes , "emotion" drives the intellect I would say , the path of thought even . The old funny view of a mad scientist for example , clearly driving by emotion on there intellectual path , the joy of learning is clearly a "emotion" driven thing . interesting :) . That would tempt one to say yes the limbic system proceeds and even drives the intellect , maybe the brain itself .As I said I think we probably totally underestimate the importance of "emotions" to the beginnings of life . We come from a single cell , always fascinated me where the motivation comes from that enable the evolution of more complex life . You could even ask where does the motivation come from for everything . But once again I loose myself and get carried away :)

Quoting fdrake

If you wanted to read about it, IEP talks about Austin's use of the term; it's a more general failure/unsuccess category than "right" or "wrong", and he applies it to speech acts. My motivation for using it was to stress that goal/task relevance acts as a constraint in active inference, the "failures" we have with it are also rooted in comparisons to what we're trying to do.

Thanks. I've had a look at the IEP and re-read the exchange in that light. It now makes a bit more sense, I think. You're saying that certain emotional responses resulting from the model might betray some higher goal even though they're the correct output from the model - so infelicitous, not "wrong"? That there could be a situation where we confuse the accurate function of the model for an accurate output? Like presuming that if a car is running really well it must be taking us where we want to go?

If so do you not think that the infelicitous output would simply constitue a prediction error of some higher model? Tom Fitzgerald has done some work with Karl Friston on active inference and habit formation which covers some of that ground. I might PM you with it though, I suspect the online equivalent of a series of blank looks if we start discussing it here!

Quoting Luke

Barrett's theory of emotions is an entirely unconscious or involuntary view of what's happening 'under the hood'. If this is right, then how does our conscious feeling of emotions tie into this?

That wasn't my intention, only to give you an idea of how both theories deal with involuntary responses. Both theories also deal with voluntary responses too. The degree to which you feel a decision is being made is not a distinguishing factor between the approaches. They really differ in the manner, felicity and the breadth in which the contributory factors are collected into a class.

Classic emotional theory has a consistent, entirely physiological collection of interoception states directly form an identifiable emotional state which then informs behavior (either via influencing concious choice, or directly).

Active inference theory has a varied collection of interoception states, together with perception states (from the environment) form a model predicting their cause. This model then initiates reactions (again, either direct involuntary or influencing voluntary choices). One of these actions is the labelling of the experience with a learned emotional label. These actions both then modify the environment and the perception/interoception states which modify the model, and so on.

Quoting StreetlightX

At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process? It's this latter view which I want to outline and discuss here.

Feldman Barrett - Solving the Emotion Paradox:"Conceptual information about emotion can be thought of as “top-down” and core affect “bottom-up” constraints on the emerging experience of emotion.

While I concur that emotions are often formed at a conscious level of their manifestation via retroactive application of emotion-concepts to that which is perceived via interoception (what Barrett terms "core affect"), I find this to be a partial, and likely derivative, truth: it is accordant to some of what is, but not all.

For clarity, some working definitions:

• Concept: a generalized idea – commonly understood to be abstracted as such from multiple concrete instantiations.
• Emotion: that which produces or influences movement within the psyche, i.e. cognitive action – often resulting in bodily movements, i.e. behaviors – but which can manifest in the absence of correspondent behaviors. For example, a pang of jealousy can be sensed by the conscious self while being shunned by the conscious self as wrong or inappropriate to act out on – this judgement being a cognitive action rather than a behavior – thereby here being an emotion that is experienced to influence without resulting in corresponding behaviors.
• Experience: awareness of that which is lived through
• Empirical: addressing awareness that is gained via sensory receptors

If “to be aware of” is “to experience” then not all experiences are empirical. As one example, I can enactively experience my decisions (illusory or not) at the instant they are made by me, for I hold awareness of them, but will not gain this awareness via sensory receptors. My awareness of the decision I make – here strictly addressing the decision itself, rather than the alternatives I was aware of – is not obtained via interpretations of what is gained via interoception or exteroception. The same non-empirical awareness may be claimed for many things introspected: thoughts, reasoning, beliefs, and so forth.

While some emotions are commonly understood to be correlated to interoceptive stimuli – e.g. disgust with some degree of bodily nausea – other emotions hold no such correspondence whatsoever. Envy I think is a fairly common emotion – and is one such example of an emotion that is not gained via interoception. Unlike anger or sorrow, there is no set of bodily stimuli obtained via interoception that corresponds to envy. The same may be said for other emotions such as longing. Then there are more atypical and more complex emotions that likewise are not correlated to any set of particular interoceptive instantiations: “sweet sorrow” as one example.

This is to say that not all emotions are associated with interoceptive feeling, i.e. core affect. Some are in no way empirical but, instead, strictly manifest within cognition via non-empirical awareness – same way we hold non-empirical awareness of the reasoning we engage in. We nevertheless metaphorically speak of “feeling” oneself to be envious. But in this case “feeling” is strictly metaphorical; as is the case with “seeing” what something means, or something “chiming” true, or a “hunger” for knowledge and a “thirst” for life.

Since not all emotions are (or are conceptual interpretations of) interoceptive feelings – again, what Barrett terms “core affect” – this to me then indicates that there is something more primary to emotions as a class than what constructivist views of emotion such as that of Barrett maintain. And there are other modern schools of thought as pertains to emotions.

In short, that all emotions are conceptual interpretations of literal feelings obtained via interoception is imv a false premise – in part falsified by emotions such as that of envy. This is not to deny the interplay between conceptual understandings of emotions and the emotions which we enactively experience – via interoception of otherwise – and which we convey to each other as holding. But it does address a need to reappraise what the class of givens we term emotions are – rather than accept the aforementioned premise as addressing a fundamental truth.

Isn't it strange how I could, possibly say something now that would spark such emotions severely; like good art?

What could this emotion be called? If not some spout of proudness, happiness or sadness.

Do these terms not correctly associate with a noticable behaviour?

Am I or am I not smart for using these terms?

Perhaps sadness is wrong, but it isn't so and so mallicious.

I'm right for thinking, 'proud and happy', as a round about association, but obviously a more visual representation is the greater judgement, as a mile-stone.

Reply to javra

Good point. I can't help thinking how inextricably interlinked the mind and body are, however.

Quoting javra

While some emotions are commonly understood to be correlated to interoceptive stimuli – e.g. disgust with some degree of bodily nausea – other emotions hold no such correspondence whatsoever. Envy I think is a fairly common emotion – and is one such example of an emotion that is not gained via interoception. Unlike anger or sorrow, there is no set of bodily stimuli obtained via interoception that corresponds to envy.

I could produce the bodily stimuli associated with anger using just my imagination and no external stimuli. I could do the same with envy. What's the difference?

Quoting praxis

I could produce the bodily stimuli associated with anger using just my imagination and no external stimuli. I could do the same with envy. What's the difference?

In respect to imagination (here broadly understood to not literally regard only images), I'd say very little if any. One can become thirsty (an interoception) by imagining oneself to so be just as one can become curious (not an interoception) by imagining oneself to so be.

Quoting praxis

I can't help thinking how inextricably interlinked the mind and body are, however.

I'm not denying the interlinked nature of mind and body, but am disagreeing with the physicalist-like notion - or predisposition of interpretation - that all cognition emerges from bodily states of being ... this expressed in my notion of simpleton talk. More correctly expressed: brain, more accurately the CNS, is a bodily organ [edit: in case this needs to be said, that depends on the workings of the total body for its functioning]; but the brain's states of being don't uniformly all emerge from the brain's interaction with the rest of the body's states of being - here taking into consideration that all awareness obtained via sensory receptors are of the latter relation. I don't want to overly-repeat the examples I previously gave, but examples can include our awareness of decisions, of the reasoning we engage in, and of certain emotions.

Quoting javra

In respect to imagination (here broadly understood to not literally regard only images), I'd say very little if any. One can become thirsty (an interoception) by imagining oneself to so be just as one can become curious (not an interoception) by imagining oneself to so be.

I should have been clearer in trying to point out that in using just imagination to become angry or envious the corresponding bodily stimuli are produced in the body. I imaging that curiosity, for example, corresponds to a bodily state of higher arousal. Whether that means a slightly higher heart rate or whatever I don't know, but there is an altered interoception.

Quoting javra

I'm not denying the interlinked nature of mind and body, but am disagreeing with the physicalist-like notion - or predisposition of interpretation - that all cognition emerges from bodily states of being

I don't believe that the theory of constructed emotion makes that claim or relies on such a notion.

Quoting praxis

I should have been clearer in trying to point out that in using just imagination to become angry or envious the corresponding bodily stimuli are produced in the body. I imaging that curiosity, for example, corresponds to a bodily state of higher arousal. Whether that means a slightly higher heart rate or whatever I don't know, but there is an altered interoception.

No denying that. This is a good example of what I'd frame as top-down effects upon bodily states emerging from cognitive states.

Quoting praxis

I don't believe that the theory of constructed emotion makes that claim or relies on such a notion.

Haven't read a lot of various constructivist views, only summations of them. Still, in my reading on this thread of Barrett's take, I've interpreted her position to necessarily make use of a) emotion-concepts that are applied to b) core affects of which we become aware, i.e. to interoception. If I'm wrong in so interpreting, I'll do an ol' SNL skit remark of "never mind". Still, what I've been upholding is that some emotions take place in the absence of core affects ("feelings" thus interpreted as interoceptive) being interpreted via emotion-concepts. Some emotions emerge simply from cognition; the example of imagining oneself to be emotion-X resulting in oneself so being then serving as one example of this. And, if this is so, then emotions are not necessarily a conflux of the (a) and, more importantly here, (b) aforementioned; i.e. they don't necessarily emerge from our awareness of our own body's states of being.

Otherwise, you're right. I probably over-generalized.

Quoting javra

what I've been upholding is that some emotions take place in the absence of core affects ("feelings" thus interpreted as interoceptive) being interpreted via emotion-concepts.

How would you know?

Quoting Isaac

How would you know?

I gave one example of envy. What set of core affects correlate to the cognitive state of envy? If any and all, then my conclusion is there is no necessary set of core affects.

Curious to find out what core affect you'd claim cannot accompany envy.

Quoting javra

What set of core affects correlate to the cognitive state of envy?

Here. An number of regions are identified.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811916303792

What I'm interested in is how you came to your conclusion. Obviously if you feel envy (or imagine yourself feeling envy) you don't have an fMRI scanner wired up to you, so what was your line of thinking that lead you to conclude there were no core affects?

Quoting Isaac

Here. An number of regions are identified.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811916303792

I hope I don't need to link to definitions of "interoception" given how long this thread is and the term's repeated use, nor need to make a distinction between first hand experience and the fMRI readings of what's going on in a brain.

To state the obvious: regions in a CNS associated with envy do not address what first hand experience of core affect can and cannot be interpreted via emotion-concepts to result in envy.

Quoting Isaac

What I'm interested in is how you came to your conclusion. Obviously if you feel envy (or imagine yourself feeling envy) you don't have an fMRI scanner wired up to you, so what was your line of thinking that lead you to conclude there were no core affects?

This is a bit staggering. Do you need fMRI results to be aware of what you are looking at, what you hear, or what you sense as emotion? I and many others don't.

BTW, the "how" carries the term of introspection - fallible thought it is.

You have still not addressed what interoceptive core affect you'd claim cannot accompany envy. (But if you're going to talk about need for fMRI results to do so ... I will not be replying, for reasons that I find obvious.)

Reply to javra

I was looking for a discussion, not an argument.

Reply to Isaac Then my bad for having misinterpreted the emotive tone.

Lets try some lateral thinking to ease the discussion . We put names to things and label them in a attempt to understand them , using our conscious mind , the notion of types of emotions is something we create in our conscious mind . What if there are only core emotions , merely a different way of understanding and the perception of these emotions by our conscious mind and our unconscious mind .
Her fear was triggered by her unconscious mind , but enjoyed by her conscious mind , once it was aware there was no risk . Taking the example of the girl and the bear . The conscious mind as a way to perceive things . Our conscious mind has the skill to twist and warp "emotions" to get what we want , because we are conscious of "emotions" , driven by the need of the subconscious mind , which I personally think is one sneaky sly fellow , for sure . Remember , lateral thinking so don't laugh at me to hard

To throw in another tangent: The emotions I'd initially be most interested in in the context of this model would be pride and shame, which are the most salient in terms of social hierarchies. You're a winner and proud of it; I'm a loser and ashamed of it, and vice versa, with on the micro-level that dynamic determining not just the practical aspects of our relationship, but also, obviously, its subjective feel. And on the macro-level, society requiring both micro- and macro-aspects of the dynamic to feed its reproduction (the process of becoming a "winner" and being motivated in that direction by the pride/shame carrot/stick being the process of moving from a mere cog in the social machine to an operator of one of its many subroutines, which operations are critical for continued functioning). Viewing emotions through the constructionist lens, the production of these emotions in the individual (and their sociopolitical results) has something of an emperor's-new-clothes feel to it. What determines these self-categorisations and why? To what degree are the core effects even physiologically opposed? Is it possible that basic needs taken care of, the quality of experience of being a "winner" and a "loser" can only be distinguished to the degree a certain social narrative is consciously/subconsciously accepted and so on. Interesting political ramifications there.

Reply to Colin Cooper

Ought to be going, but wanted to say you bring up a good point, if I interpret you correctly. Fear, aggression, and fun are three conceptually distinct emotions that can all result from bodily sensations of immanent peril. So it’s said, by “fun” in here thinking of activities like rock-climbing or roller-coaster rides. There’s the body’s production of adrenaline, this being the core affect in response to sub/unconsciously perceived peril. How one reacts to this core affect cognitively - here trying to keep things as simple as possible - then results in fear of, aggression toward, or a sense of fun. Notwithstanding my previous posts, this to me is one example of how cognition can at times interact with bodily sensations to produce specific emotions. Myself, as per Dewey and contra James’ thesis, I yet take the resulting emotion to temporally precede and be a causal factor to the behaviors that then unfold: e.g., fear resulting in flight, aggression in attack, and fun in bodily states of pleasure.

Quoting javra

I should have been clearer in trying to point out that in using just imagination to become angry or envious the corresponding bodily stimuli are produced in the body. I imaging that curiosity, for example, corresponds to a bodily state of higher arousal. Whether that means a slightly higher heart rate or whatever I don't know, but there is an altered interoception.
— praxis

No denying that. This is a good example of what I'd frame as top-down effects upon bodily states emerging from cognitive states.

Not sure what you may be implying by mentioning bodily states emerging from cognitive states. Imagined envy is basically a simulation that can produce the same emotional response as an exteroceptive experience, going back to that example. The theory doesn't hold that an emotion like envy is gained via interoception alone. I don't recall the specifics, I learned about the theory a couple of years ago, but it involves subconscious prediction, an aspect that you may not be fully appreciating at this point.

Quoting 3017amen

Can you elucidate a bit more on that?

It's an age old problem for moral philosophy which Socrates demonstrated quite well in arguments against the sophists. We cannot say that virtue and morality are a type of knowledge, because people demonstrate over and over again, that despite knowing that they know it is wrong, they choose to do what they know is wrong. This means that the intellect cannot determine the will.

Quoting praxis

Not sure what you may be implying by mentioning bodily states emerging from cognitive states.

I didn’t intend the term “emerge” as in philosophical understanding of emergence but as in “coming out from.” At the time it seemed more appropriate than to say “caused by” (thinking it minimized the metaphysical implications). My use of the term was not optimal.

What I said has a lot to do with my understandings of top-down and bottom-up process of mind. I recognize this is not mainstream, and I don’t intend to here argue for them. I only want to offer a more meaningful reply.

I take it for granted that we’ve been addressing voluntary imagination. The example of envy to me is in this situation farfetched. Why would someone imagine themselves envious in order to so become? It’s an unpleasant emotion to experience. But to imagine oneself calm when one is turbulent and vice versa is common practice in some meditation schools of thought I’ve read. (It is even claimed that those experienced in such practices can, to varying degrees, alter their metabolic rates at will.) Calming one’s body when feeling anxious, this by voluntarily imagining oneself to be calm, would be something willed by the conscious self. Hence, in short, if successful it would be an effect consisting of bodily states caused by the intentions of the conscious self - this then being a top-down process of mind.

However, this is not to say that the conscious self is not resultant of subconscious process from which it emerges (here in the philosophical sense of emergence) - these being bottom-up processes of mind.

Again, though, if possible I’d like to currently abstain from debating how mind can be simultaneously composed of both bottom-up and top-down processes.

Quoting praxis

it involves subconscious prediction

To be honest, I find it hard to fathom how a mind could possibly work without these.

Quoting javra

If “to be aware of” is “to experience” then not all experiences are empirical. As one example, I can enactively experience my decisions (illusory or not) at the instant they are made by me, for I hold awareness of them, but will not gain this awareness via sensory receptors.

I actually agree with this in full. In fact, perhaps the thing that most powerfully interests me in Barrett's account of emotion is that it leaves open this very possibility. Barrett indeed makes some moves in this direction when she notes that A:

Solving...:"A simulation of anger could allow a person to go beyond the information given to fill in aspects of a core affective response that are not present at a given perceptual instance. In such a case, the simulation essentially produces an illusory correlation between response outputs"

(my bolding)

And that B:

The Theory...:"Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli"

.

Taken together, what's at stake is the ability of conceptual evaluation to become 'runaway processes', that is, processes that becomes 'exapted' from their original purpose and attain a certain degree of autonomy. The fact that conceptual evalution (qua conscious emotional registration) takes place on a 'second-level' as it were, is what enables an account of disjunctions betwen affect and emotion such that you get emotional 'misfirings', or even, in some of the cases you're talking about, the development of complex emotion-concepts which are ascribed to core affects without being strictly warranted by them.

In other words, the 'mapping' from affect to emotion is not unidirectional or guaranteed, which indeed why a the same affective state can give rise to different emotions, depending on top-down 'constraints' (language is the example that Barrett often given as such a constraint, but so too can be one's entire environmental situation). This is what is in the background between the discussion between @fdrake and myself about the question of emotional 'in/felicity' which @Issac was inquiring about: it's a question emotions 'running away' from their sensory bases and attaining a degree of quasi-autonomy from them.

The last thing I'll add here is that this is so powerful because it account, in a thoroughly naturalist way - for the richness of emotion. On the 'classical account' there would always need to be some kind of one-to-one correspondence between affect and emotion (if indeed the distinciton is acknowledged as all): there would be a distinct CNS state for envy, one for longing, for schadenfreude, for nostalgia, for every possible conceivable emotion, all hard-wired and then merely 'expressed'.

(Recall, in this connection, Socrates' unease when Parmenides confronts him with the question of whether or not there are Ideas - perfect Forms - of dirt, mud, and filth: Socrates totally fudges the question, precisely because these essentialist accounts are totally unable to confront the emergence of novelty).

On this account however, novel emotions ('niche' emotions?) come about precisely on account of the formation of new, 'non-empirical' concepts that are brought to bear on affects that are tailored to bring to attention novel features of one's behavioural/environmental state. It is precisely because of the complexity that can be built-in at the level of concepts which means that it is unnecessary that there be an affect for every conceivable emotion. It's only by acknowledging the 'autonomy' of the conceptual that you open the door to a rich emotional life that is not bound to a limited number of 'affective pre-sets', as it were.

Quoting javra

If “to be aware of” is “to experience” then not all experiences are empirical. As one example, I can enactively experience my decisions (illusory or not) at the instant they are made by me, for I hold awareness of them, but will not gain this awareness via sensory receptors. My awareness of the decision I make – here strictly addressing the decision itself, rather than the alternatives I was aware of – is not obtained via interpretations of what is gained via interoception or exteroception. The same non-empirical awareness may be claimed for many things introspected: thoughts, reasoning, beliefs, and so forth.

‘To be aware of’ is not the same as ‘to experience’. Often what we experience, we are aware of only as sensory events - even though we integrate the information at the level of experience - that is, as a relation of value or potential to act. Technically, we have the capacity to distinguish between the sensory event and the experience, but in many cases we have not developed this capacity for awareness in emotion, remembering, reasoning or thinking, etc.

In Barrett’s theory, the internal sensory event of a difference in core affect contributes to the complex experience of emotion, as well as external sensory events, such as where we are, who we’re with and what we’re listening to. The way I see it, other complex experiences such thoughts, memories and beliefs are also the result of evaluative interaction between internal and external sensory events - not all of which we are able to distinguish from awareness of the experience itself, let alone consciously evaluate for accuracy and relevance.

I like to think of it this way: a sensory event, whether internal or external, is temporally located. An experience, on the other hand, refers to an atemporal relativity of value and potential.

Quoting javra

While some emotions are commonly understood to be correlated to interoceptive stimuli – e.g. disgust with some degree of bodily nausea – other emotions hold no such correspondence whatsoever. Envy I think is a fairly common emotion – and is one such example of an emotion that is not gained via interoception. Unlike anger or sorrow, there is no set of bodily stimuli obtained via interoception that corresponds to envy. The same may be said for other emotions such as longing. Then there are more atypical and more complex emotions that likewise are not correlated to any set of particular interoceptive instantiations: “sweet sorrow” as one example.

‘Envy’ in relation to core affect has an unpleasant valence and is distinguished from ‘jealousy’ by a relatively low arousal. It is distinguished from other interoceptive instantiations of unpleasant, low arousal affect by a relative sense of loss or lack, and from other emotions such as ‘longing’ by a directional relation.

‘Sweet sorrow’, on the other hand, seems to recognise a distinction between simultaneous and conflicting interoceptive instantiations - this is a complexity to the theory that Barrett has not developed much (as far as I can recall) but I think the theory still holds. What she refers to as ‘core affect’ is in itself a reduction of more complex information regarding the state of the organism.

Quoting Baden

Is it possible that basic needs taken care of, the quality of experience of being a "winner" and a "loser" can only be distinguished to the degree a certain social narrative is consciously/subconsciously accepted and so on.

Yeah, one of the things that follows very clearly from this account is what might be called the socaility of emotion. If emotion is a matter of bodily, predictive, conceptual evaluation, and if this evaluation does not always proceed bottom-up but also top-down, then it follows that the exact individuation of affect (as this emotion rather than that one, or indeed as a strong emotion at all), can be (and is) profoundly socially modulated. And just as Barrett talks of 'anger scripts' which are variously employed, one can quite as easily talk of 'pride scripts' or 'shame scripts', which, like all 'scripts' always imply a degree of impersonality to them (to 'follow a script' or 'act in accordance with a script', is, in someways, a delegation of agency, or better, an exercise of agency through 'third party' means).

So there's absolutely a social element - an irreducible social element - to the production of shame and pride (why shame in these circumstances? Why these objects of pride?). I mean, even the terms you used - winner and loser - are immediately socially differentiated terms (loser compared to who? Winner among which population? And on whose terms?). And this is one of the really cool things about Barrett's account - the mutual implication of the bio-social in ways that implicate the social right at the level of biology. I mean, consider the ways in which scripts are 'represented':

"When applied to representing knowledge about emotion, the idea is that the human brain captures every instance of core affect that is labeled as anger. Information is captured as it occurs in perception represented in sensory cortices), action (represented in motor cortex), and interoception (represented a
somatovisceral information in insular cortex). The word occurs is used here to refer to instances where affective behaviors or events are labeled as anger when the category anger is first being learned. Later, these modality-specific states are available to be reactivated to represent knowledge about anger. When retrieving information about anger, sensory, motor, and interoceptive states are partially reinstated in the relevant aspects of cortex, simulating an instance of anger".

- One can't distinguish, except for analytic purposes, between the social and the biological: the biological is directly sculpted, in it's plasticity, by the social. There's a whole ethics and politics of our biology here that is super interesting and worth investigating.

@baden, @javra

Some elaboration, via the philosopher John Protvei, on the stakes of thinking about emotion as an impersonal, social entity:

[quote=John Protevi "Life, War, Earth"] To appreciate the full radicality of this notion of emotion as an “interindividual process,” we must add that those neural changes have to be thought in relation to the modifications to the emergent functional unit of the couple or group in which the component individuals are interacting. The neural bases of this interindividual process are found in each person’s brain, but the unit we are analyzing is nonsubjective but relational, that is, interindividual

...We should also note at the outset that this emergent neuro-somatic-social emotional process need not only be equilibrium seeking; too often, any mention of group processes is seen as equilibrium seeking (negative feedback) as in “functionalist” sociology. Rather, we are all familiar with interpersonal emotions that spin out of control in positive feedback loops (a mob rage, of course, but on the positive side of the ledger, falling in love cannot really be seen as equilibrium seeking, even if a stable, loving couple results, for that stability can be a mutually reinforcing dynamic process of empowerment that never settles down to anything we can describe as an equilibrium). ... Adult structures, that is, adult patterns of interaction, are themselves individuations of a distributed and differential social field[/quote]

(Protevi was writing this is a totally different context - in fact in response to a reading of the work of the neuropsyhcologist Bruce Wexler - but it applies mutatis mutandis to Barrett's own theory of emotions).

Quoting Isaac

Thanks. I've had a look at the IEP and re-read the exchange in that light. It now makes a bit more sense, I think. You're saying that certain emotional responses resulting from the model might betray some higher goal even though they're the correct output from the model - so infelicitous, not "wrong"? That there could be a situation where we confuse the accurate function of the model for an accurate output? Like presuming that if a car is running really well it must be taking us where we want to go?

That's about where I was going, aye.

I think "infelicity" is a good touchstone to describe what the "prediction errors" of active inference, in terms of emotion, might be. They're still "optimal predictions" (in some sense) given their constraints and priors, but that does not mean the priors reflect the relational dynamics of the body and its environment, and their potential developments given the interventions I propose.

In the back of my mind I was contrasting classification error in a machine learning model (does a model trained to recognize bridges in pictures recognize a bridge in this picture? When there is no bridge? When there is a bridge?) to one where the "success criteria" are more complicated; do I succeed in this goal, more or less? Is it the right goal? Am I operating in a fruitful cognitive frame for this task? Does "getting angry" help here? What about being remorseful?

If so do you not think that the infelicitous output would simply constitue a prediction error of some higher model? Tom Fitzgerald has done some work with Karl Friston on active inference and habit formation which covers some of that ground. I might PM you with it though, I suspect the online equivalent of a series of blank looks if we start discussing it here!

I guess that would depend on the higher model considered. I tried to suggest what I mean above (but would like to see the paper if you have it on hand).

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

It's an age old problem for moral philosophy which Socrates demonstrated quite well in arguments against the sophists. We cannot say that virtue and morality are a type of knowledge, because people demonstrate over and over again, that despite knowing that they know it is wrong, they choose to do what they know is wrong. This means that the intellect cannot determine the will.

Thanks MU!

That reminds me of the Christian metaphor (in Scripture) as paraphrased: My mind will's one thing; my flesh another.

(I believe emotion is will; it is not a intellectual concept. Our emotional needs cannot be learned from intellectual concepts.)

Reply to 3017amen
I don't think anyone really understands will, it's just one of those things. There's many different ways to approach it, but you get side tracked before you get there, as if there's a forcefield which surrounds it and deflects you off this way or that way, depending on your approach.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

Can we infer then, that emotions are not understood through the prism of logic?

Reply to javra I look at it slightly different , we have fun as a reward , a rock climber enjoys the actively because he is preparing , physically and emotionally for perceived dangers he may face , one of the reasons we have evolved to what we are today , the ability to imagine and prepare for danger . To me it seems one the biggest drives for people enjoying sports . We have "fun" for a reason .
As in the case of the rollercoaster or the person watching a horror movie , there conscious mind allows you to have "fun" , it is conscious of the emotion and wants more , driven by the need of the subconscious to have "fun" . In short I believe we are cheating the system to get our dosage . We watch a feel good film , we feel good . yet we are not in a good situation , we cheat the system . This we are able to do because of a conscious mind , but always driven by the sneaky subconscious . :)

To go of on a one . Does a tree feel happy when it bathes in a summer sun ? in a primal sense I believe it does , it is driven to the sun . By what ? I believe the drive or will of a thing is "emotions" . Our problem is we are conscious of this "feeling" we question it , we label it , we are arrogant with it . A tree simply reacts to this "emotion" . Do remember I am just thinking in a lateral sense

Quoting javra

If “to be aware of” is “to experience” then not all experiences are empirical. As one example, I can enactively experience my decisions (illusory or not) at the instant they are made by me, for I hold awareness of them, but will not gain this awareness via sensory receptors. My awareness of the decision I make – here strictly addressing the decision itself, rather than the alternatives I was aware of – is not obtained via interpretations of what is gained via interoception or exteroception. The same non-empirical awareness may be claimed for many things introspected: thoughts, reasoning, beliefs, and so forth.

I'm not sure what this means. I find it hard to conceive of any decisions we make (or, for that matter, thought, reasoning, beliefs) that aren't related to what is taking place, or has taken place, during our lives, and our lives consist of our interactions with the rest of the world. Are these decisions, thoughts, beliefs you refer to then something that we become aware of in some manner sua sponte (of its/their/our own accord) as it were? What is "non-empirical awareness"?

Quoting javra

it involves subconscious prediction
— praxis

To be honest, I find it hard to fathom how a mind could possibly work without these.

One way might be like the computers we are now using, though of course they aren't minds and may never develop into being minds.

To stray from the topic a bit, The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence developed by Jeff Hawkins (Numenta) applies the principles (hierarchical auto-associative memory and prediction algorithms) of real intelligence to AI. Imagine training machines instead of trying to program them.

Reply to StreetlightX Quoting StreetlightX

At stake in this is the status of emotion: is it an 'origin' - a brute biological given that is simply 'activated' in certain circumstances - or is it instead a 'result' - a bio-social 'production' that helps orient one's actions and is the outcome of an evaluative process? It's this latter view which I want to outline and discuss here.

The basic idea behind this second view of emotion is that emotion is two-pronged, as it were. At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations.

Probably, to conceive an individual emotional sphere in relation to socially determined cognitive and affective processes, we could use Simondon’s approach. An individual and society are never
in a relationship as one term to another, as though two independent essences interact with each other. On the contrary, they are in the ongoing process of reciprocal individuation. “The individual only enters into a relationship with the social through the social.
The psychosocial personality is contemporaneous with the genesis of the group, which is individuation.” (Simondon, Individuation: psychic and collective). The process of social mediation has been rapidly changing over time. Benedict Andersen, in his book “Imagined Communities,” proposed that the nation was created due to a sense of “horizontal comradeship.” The mass mechanical production of printed works united people through the interiorization of literary culture. Before Anderson, a similar project was persuaded by Walter Benjamin. “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art…The reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional engagement…The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). “Technical reproducibility,” the film, provided new possibilities for collective experiences: mass became the new and the only spectator of a film and the consumer of mass culture. In both examples, social mediation involves two dimensions: categorical affects, which takes place at the pre-programmed level of the enactment of virtual intensities, and vitality affects at the level of emotions experienced by an individual. The co-occurring aspects of mutual interplay create various transindividual links and effects. The organization of the techno-social medium covering the gap between registers plays a decisive role. Anderson’s national state and Benjamin’s fascist regime require distinct complexes of collective and individual affects. In our time, our virtual medium, connecting the social with the individual, contains and compresses a multitude of various registers. Due to the complex topology of interconnections, we often experience its effects without a clear understanding or explanation.

Quoting 3017amen

Can we infer then, that emotions are not understood through the prism of logic?

To the contrary, I think logic is the only way to understand emotions. We can't make empirical observations of their causes, so we can only use logic.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

the contrary, I think logic is the only way to understand emotions. We can't make empirical observations of their causes, so we can only use logic.

MU!

Thanks for your reply. Would you happen to have any examples of how logic can help us explain the nature of emotional will?

Thank you kindly.

Reply to 3017amen
For example, here's what I posted earlier in the thread.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/404078

Reply to StreetlightX Reply to StreetlightX

Thanks for the replies. I see what you are elaborating on. Though I approach things from a somewhat different perspective, I don’t find much to disagree with. If anything, there’s this nagging issue of lesser animals, sometimes solitary and very primitive, also being emotive beings. But, again, I’m in overall agreement.

Quoting Possibility

‘To be aware of’ is not the same as ‘to experience’. Often what we experience, we are aware of only as sensory events - even though we integrate the information at the level of experience - that is, as a relation of value or potential to act.

I acknowledge that there are nuances to the two terms, but can you elaborate on why you find the interchangeability of these two terms inappropriate within the contexts here addressed? Both terms have relatively imprecise definitions, and I so far find that they can both be used to reference the same given attribute of conscious being. To approach this differently: to be consciously aware of X entails one’s conscious experience of X; conversely, to consciously experience X entails one’s conscious awareness of X; such that one cannot be had without the other. If you’re using the terms “awareness” and “experience” in specialized senses that makes the aforementioned usage invalid, can you point me to the literature where the two terms are thus differentiated?

Quoting Possibility

‘Envy’ in relation to core affect has an unpleasant valence and is distinguished from ‘jealousy’ by a relatively low arousal.

Envy can sometimes in some people be of a very high arousal, from my knowledge of the world - at times being concurrent with visceral hatred for those envied, with theft, or worse. As to its unpleasant valence, yes, but are there sensory receptors for the interoception of that which is experienced to be unpleasant and for what is experienced to be pleasant? Or do these attributes manifest only cognitively? Please read my next reply to @Ciceronianus the White to better understand where I’m coming from (last I recall, interoception is defined as a perception resulting from physiological sensations within the body, which in turn initially obtain from physiologic receptors located within the body)

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

I'm not sure what this means. I find it hard to conceive of any decisions we make (or, for that matter, thought, reasoning, beliefs) that aren't related to what is taking place, or has taken place, during our lives, and our lives consist of our interactions with the rest of the world. Are these decisions, thoughts, beliefs you refer to then something that we become aware of in some manner sua sponte (of its/their/our own accord) as it were? What is "non-empirical awareness"?

I’ll do my best to better explain. (no need to visit all the links; just given for those who prefer references) First off, though the term perception can be used in a variety of ways - including the “conscious understanding of something” (e.g., perceived value) - in the sciences it is interpreted to be the “organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information” which, as sensory information, originates with physiological receptors – in animals, as these sensory receptors pertain to sensory neurons. This applies to both our exteroception and interoception, both being types of perception thus scientifically understood. Secondly, empiricism is in contemporary thought understood to be "a theory stating that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience", with sensory experience being in turn understood to result from the physiological senses, and, again, with the latter necessarily incorporating sensory receptors.

In short, to consciously perceive is to gain conscious awareness of givens via sensory receptors. And that which is empirically known is known due to such perception, hence due to sensory receptors’ initial obtainment of information. The details are vast, and sometimes debatable, but none of the details contradict the just mentioned, at least as far as I am aware.

As regards decisions:

You’re faced with a choice between A and B. You know of A and B empirically. Say you decide on A at the expense of B. You know what you decide at the moment of the decision and you will be able to recall this decision at least shortly thereafter. You consciously know of your decision because you are, or were, consciously aware of so deciding (if consciously unaware of what was decided, or if a decision was made, you’d hold no conscious knowledge of what was decided, or of whether a decision was made). The decision you make is however neither the empirically known A nor the empirically known B. It is instead your intention upon which of these to choose. If your awareness of the decision taken is obtained from sensory receptors transmitting physiological sensations that are then interpreted by you via perception, this awareness would then be empirical knowledge of your decision. In which case, it seems cogent to affirm that sensory receptors would somehow physiologically transduce you as a conscious-self in the act of making a decision into physiological sensations that you as conscious-self come to perceive - thereby resulting in your awareness of your decision. If this is not what happens, then your knowing what decision you make, or have made, is not empirical knowledge - for it is not acquired via perception as scientifically understood. Nevertheless, you know of the decision because you are aware of what decision you’ve made. Hence, in the later scenario, your awareness of your own decision taken would be non-empirical, but instead strictly cognitive.

I've given what to me is an extreme interpretation in attempts to better convey what I interpret as being empirical awareness of gives (e.g., things perceived) and non-empirical awareness of givens (e.g., givens that occur only within cognizance). The same roundabout perspective would then apply to your awareness of your propositional attitudes, of the concepts you analyze, or of the reasoning you engage in.

As one counterexample, otherwise one could validly claim that a visually imagined unicorn is empirically known to oneself on grounds that one has seen what it looks like (this with the mind's eye).

Quoting fdrake

They're still "optimal predictions" (in some sense) given their constraints and priors, but that does not mean the priors reflect the relational dynamics of the body and its environment, and their potential developments given the interventions I propose.

I think that's really one of the important take-aways from the active inference model of emotional construction. Sufficient values from our environment are put into the priors for the model (and indirectly into our perception - but Barrett doesn't talk much about that) that we have to dismiss the notion of emotions being beyond judgement as in getting rid of the idea that "I'm just a feisty person", "I can't help myself" etc. Obviously there's a focus on self-help, but I think no less a focus should be put on societal influences. sociol-politics aside though, the point is that we can be wrong about our emotions not just in the sense that they're not suited to our modern world (that idea has been around for years) but that they're not 'suited' to any world, they don't come pre-packaged and suited to some set of circumstances predicted by evolution. They are an adaptation formed by the process of living within a social environment, learning from its cues - we don't get angry when the shopkeeper short-changes us because our bodies have an inbuilt system to fight off lions, we get angry when the shopkeeper short-changes us because getting angry in such a situation is a response which explains the entire situation (heart-rate, shop-keeper, coins, justice, monetary value, pride...) in a package which has produced least errors in the past.

I think one of the sources of confusion in many of the posts here (not yours) is in the false impression (Barrett is not particularly clear on this, I have to say) that when she talks about perception and interoception she's talking about pure data. Lot's of people seem intuitively turned-off by the model because they're seeing it as {heart-rate, image of a lion, nausea}='fear'. But this is, of course, not what she's saying. As we know, the forward-acting signals from the perception and interoception cortices are themselves predictive models, so the emotion constructing system is not getting raw data, it's getting interpreted, meaningful data

This information is available for later use by limbic cortices as they generatively initiate prediction signals, constructed as low-dimensional, multimodal summaries (i.e. ‘abstractions’); these summaries, consolidated from prior encoding of prediction errors, become more detailed and particular as they propagate out to more architecturally granular sensory and motor regions to complete embodied concept
generation

The way in which goal-oriented prediction errors might be fed back into the emotion system, as you're talking about with infelicity, is only hinted at by Barrett...

the salience network tunes the internal model by predicting which prediction errors to pay attention to [i.e. those errors that are likely to be allostatically relevant and therefore worth the cost of encoding and consolidation; called precision signals

...but Friston goes into it in more detail here (still not the right paper I promised you though!). The whole paper is really interesting, but the bit relevant to what you (and @StreetlightX) are talking about is section 5.2 (save you wading through the whole thing). It talks about how active inference models deal with (and better explain) the formation of habits which are in contravention of goals - ie ones which are no longer updating priors. It's quite complicated, but basically, the response from the habit (the forward-acting signal) become the expected input in an higher-order model. As such, so long as the habit is delivering the predicted output , there's no need to change the model-choosing model above it (in the hierarchy). it shows (or claims to) how an uncertainty reduction model better predicts habit vs investigative choices than a purely goal-directed model.

Quoting 3017amen

My interpretation of Will is that it is dumb, blind, emotive force that causes us to exist. In a humanistic existential context, it would be the Will to live and not commit suicide, for example. In other words as apposed to instinct, we have an intrinsic need to live and feel happy. In an ontological way, it is our need to be. We want to feel happy; it is our way of Being.

And in that sense, the OP question becomes, like Colin Cooper's post suggested, we don't learn emotions. Another example (from Colin's post) one could add to the mix of things, is the emotive feeling and phenomenon of listening to music. We don't learn the initial emotional experience when listening to same. Nor do we understand what biological advantages that has to our species. When we hear it, we like it; it feels good to us.

Emotions themselves are not concepts. Our will to listen to music (jazz, rock, country, classical, bebop) confers no biological advantages to our species. Same with Love. (Lower life forms utilize instinct and emergent properties genetically coded to procreate.) The will (and choice) to love someone, listen to music, or any (higher order) emotional phenomenon is an innate feature of higher consciousness.

What is the nature of this feeling to satisfy those existential needs, is my question to Streetlightx.

I understand the will to be informed directly by an organism’s overall relational structure (not necessarily an awareness of that structure), including intellect and affect, and in turn it determines and initiates the specific interactions of that relational structure. Like emotion concepts, the idea that ‘life’, ‘love’, ‘happiness’ or ‘survival’ are innate concepts or instincts that simply exist - hardwired into our genetics and identical for every human - I believe is a misunderstanding, not only of how concepts are formed from empirical experience, but also of what is ultimately valuable or meaningful.

I need to clarify a distinction here, first of all, between learning about emotions as concepts, and constructing the concepts from scratch by learning to differentiate sensory information.

When we listen to music, what we get from the sensory event depends on our capacity to differentiate and interrelate diverse information from sound values. The more refined this capacity, the more diverse our interoception of affect - including both pleasant and unpleasant, arousing and calming sensations - across the duration of the sensory event. The more our affect varies, the more differentiated potential information we would experience in the one sensory event. And the more differentiated potential information, the more meaningful our relation to that experience.

In this way, instances of ‘listening to music’ have a general pattern of being highly affective for those have the capacity to appreciate the diversity. But the concept of ‘listening to music’ is perceived by many as generally pleasurable not because of any supposed ‘biological advantage’ or ‘survival value’, but because it satisfies a much deeper impetus: to increase awareness, connection and collaboration. In my view, it is this deeper impetus that drives the will - not just in humanity, but across all forms of life and matter.

'The will' is a grammatical mistake. A modal verb mistaken for a substantive and pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all. The less it is taken seriously the better.

Quoting javra

‘To be aware of’ is not the same as ‘to experience’. Often what we experience, we are aware of only as sensory events - even though we integrate the information at the level of experience - that is, as a relation of value or potential to act.
— Possibility

I acknowledge that there are nuances to the two terms, but can you elaborate on why you find the interchangeability of these two terms inappropriate within the contexts here addressed? Both terms have relatively imprecise definitions, and I so far find that they can both be used to reference the same given attribute of conscious being. To approach this differently: to be consciously aware of X entails one’s conscious experience of X; conversely, to consciously experience X entails one’s conscious awareness of X; such that one cannot be had without the other. If you’re using the terms “awareness” and “experience” in specialized senses that makes the aforementioned usage invalid, can you point me to the literature where the two terms are thus differentiated?

I agree that these terms are generally interchangeable, so it gets very confusing. In my view, ‘awareness’ refers to informative interaction as a general term, and often needs to be qualified in relation to the level of awareness, as well as whether this awareness is generally speaking, or an awareness ‘of X’. I try to reserve ‘experience’ to refer particularly to a conceptual level of awareness, mainly because we tend to use ‘experience’ as a noun in reference to this level of awareness.

In your examples here you’ve used the term ‘conscious’ to qualify both experience and awareness. In my view, to experience X one need not be conscious of X, but to be aware of X one need not be conscious at all. And I’ve now realised my error: that the distinction I was referring to was conscious awareness.

To be consciously aware of X entails one’s experience of X, but while to experience X entails consciousness, it does not entail one to be consciously aware of X.

I’m saying that we’re not always self-consciously aware of all the information we integrate from experience. This is where affective realism becomes an issue: when the cause of a particular affect is uncertain. A particularly dreary day can leave us feeling depressed without recognising that the weather had anything to with it. Or we may not realise that the reason we’ve been feeling on edge all day is because we’ve been anticipating an encounter with someone that didn’t eventuate.

Reply to StreetlightX

'The will' is a grammatical mistake. A modal verb mistaken for a substantive and pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all. The less it is taken seriously the better.

Yet if I were to propse that "the affect" is a grammatical mistake, a verb mistaken for a substantive pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all, no doubt you would say I was just an idiot missing the point.

Reply to jkg20 Probably.

Quoting StreetlightX

'The will' is a grammatical mistake. A modal verb mistaken for a substantive and pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all. The less it is taken seriously the better.

So that would explain the reason for this, then:

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think anyone really understands will, it's just one of those things. There's many different ways to approach it, but you get side tracked before you get there, as if there's a forcefield which surrounds it and deflects you off this way or that way, depending on your approach.

There's really nothing there, no such thing as the will. It appears as a big deception, created by those Christian theologians who've constructed and maintained the concept. That sure makes things a lot simpler, applying Occam's razor.

Quoting praxis

Imagine training machines instead of trying to program them.

:ok:

Quoting bongo fury

The price of the neural network revolution was giving up (or at least severely compromising) the model of the brain (or computer) as a processor of stored symbols - internal words and pictures representing external objects. Ironically, it had to revert to Skinner's behaviourist model, a "black box". Training, without necessarily understanding the learning.

(Admittedly off-topic, except possibly as regards the question of internal (or external) words and pictures representing internal processes.)

Reply to StreetlightX Are you familiar with Damasio? I believe he differentiated between ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ in pretty much the same way you’ve briefly outlined.

Excuse my fumbling, I think it goes something like emotions are felt and feelings are experienced - I guess the ‘experienced’ would be akin to ‘conceptualised’.

Undoubtedly emotions are physiological, yet we may not be fully conscious of the emotion at the time - or confuse emotional states. Attending to and learning how and when emotions present is certainly a learned ‘skill’.

Reply to javra
Well, it seems to me to be the case that we simply decide. We don't become aware that we do so. Someone else may become aware that we've made a decision, but we don't. Similarly, we think some way about something. But we don't become aware of the fact we do so. If we decide or think, there's nothing we need become aware of, the nature of which we must determine ,and to which we must assign the category or characteristic non-empirical.

I can't help but wonder if these efforts at definition are misleading when we refer to becoming aware of what we do or are doing, as it seems to me clear that awareness doesn't come into play except, perhaps, in remarkable circumstances (sleepwalking?). The fact that we might in very limited circumstances become aware we did something doesn't mean that it's accurate to say we are aware that we decide, or think, or feel.

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

Well, it seems to me to be the case that we simply decide. We don't become aware that we do so. [...] The fact that we might in very limited circumstances become aware we did something doesn't mean that it's accurate to say we are aware that we decide, or think, or feel.

Your point of view is very curious to me.

If we’re not usually aware of our decisions, thoughts, or feelings (I don’t recall using the phrase “become aware”, which alters the common use meaning of the term) how is it that it can be concluded that these usually occur in us in the first place?

You mention:

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

Someone else may become aware that we've made a decision, but we don't.

But if an individual that is contemplating others does not him/herself hold direct awareness of making decisions, of having thoughts, of sensing feelings, and the like, on what grounds would such individual discern others as factually having the capacity to engage in these activities?

Reply to javra
"Aware" is defined as "having or showing realization, perception or knowledge" by Merriam Webster online, and "having knowledge or discernment of something" according to the American Heritage dictionary online.

For me, it seems very odd to say that we have realization, or perception, or knowledge of the fact we've made a decision, or have decided something, or that we have discernment of a decision we've made or discern that we've made one. Thus, we don't often hear someone say "I perceive (or realize, or know or discern--or am aware) I've made a decision." Nor do we hear someone say "I have no realization (or perception or knowledge--or am not aware) of making a decision." I think it's very odd to say the same regarding a thought or feeling we have.

I think this oddity indicates there's a problem with claiming we're aware we've made a decision, or have a thought or a feeling. None of them are things we are or are not aware of.

Reply to Ciceronianus the White Not to sound too pretentious (nor to deny that I am), but expressing personal opinions in reply to logical questions that are left unaddressed is not philosophy. Its fine as far as it goes, but I'm here to engage in philosophy, myself.

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

Thus, we don't often hear someone say "I perceive (or realize, or know or discern--or am aware) I've made a decision."

So I take it that you would say you don't know (edit: or cannot appraise whether you know or not) what decisions you make or have made, nor what thoughts you contemplate, nor what feelings you have. I call bs.

Reply to javra
I'm saying I think it's inappropriate to treat our own decisions, thoughts, feelings as if they were like objects or things we discern, realize, perceive , or know. There are objects and things we discern, realize, perceive and know, through observation, testing, investigation, interaction, etc., but our own thoughts and feelings are not such objects or things. There's no need for us to perceive or realize or even to know them in the sense we know or can come to know the rest of the world. If I say "I know I feel hot" I'm saying something bizarre.

Our decisions, thoughts and feelings shouldn't be conceived of as if they are things generated or lurking in our minds or brains or bodies of which we're aware. I think that's to reify them

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

I'm saying I think it's inappropriate to treat our own decisions, thoughts, feelings as if they were like objects or things [...]

In your worry about reifying decisions, thoughts, and feelings into objects or things – something which was never once done nor would be by anyone with any amount of reflection – you might in fact be reifying awareness. As if it’s customary for a person to say, “I’m aware of (alternatively: I know, I discern, or I realize that I am) seeing a tree,” instead of just saying, “I see a tree.” Or worse, concluding that because the former expression is not ordinary (this on grounds that it is implicitly understood and thereby redundant) the person is therefore “neither aware nor unaware” of seeing a tree.

I know when I’m thirsty; so were someone to tell me that I’m thirsty when I’m not, I will be disagreeing on matters of fact, not on matters of semantics or of opinion: matters of fact regarding what I hold direct awareness of and the other doesn’t. I might be dehydrated, but if I’m not thirsty, I’m not thirsty. The same applies to major decisions in my life – for which I might feel pride or regret precisely due to knowing what decisions I’ve taken. And so forth. The just mentioned is common practice wherever I’ve been ... with the exception of this forum.

And in your likely reification of “awareness” you seem unable to provide an account of how we arrive at the conclusion that decisions, thoughts, and feelings occur in the first place. Something I find extremely lacking philosophically.

Reply to Ciceronianus the White

If this is of any help, cognition has a lot to do with cognizance, the latter being defined as “notice or awareness” by Wiktionary for the context here addressed. Being cognizant of (e.g., one’s introspections) is thereby interchangeable with being aware of (e.g., one’s introspections).

Quoting I like sushi

Are you familiar with Damasio? I believe he differentiated between ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ in pretty much the same way you’ve briefly outlined.

Yeah, I briefly referenced Damasio's own distinction earlier in the thread somewhere, and though I've read Descartes' Error, it was a loong time ago. There's definite overlaps with his approach and that of Barrett, though I believe Barrett makes more explicit and makes alot more hay of the fact that emotions have a predictive, inferential role, and are productively thought of in terms of concepts and cateogorizations.

Reply to StreetlightX I’ll have to look into Barrett more.

1. There are alternative futures A and B, A is made the present, meaning A is chosen
2. Then there is the question "What was it that made the decision turn out A?"
3. Then the answer is a choice between subjective words X and Y
4. Where either answer X or Y is equally valid, but a forced answer X or Y is invalid.

It means that emotions can only be identified by spontaneous expression of emotion with free will, resulting in an opinion on what the emotions are. As well someone's own emotions, as someone else's, can only be identified with a chosen opinion.

So if someone chooses A, then you can express a chosen opinion that he chose A out of fear, jealousy, lust, hate, love, joy etc. And any answer would be equally logically valid.

Some answers may then in turn be judged (with a chosen opinion) as weird, mean, unfair, stupid, but it is not actually a logical error to be weird mean unfair and stupid.

The subjective spirit (emotions), chooses which way the objective material turns out.

So actually the original poster saying that anger is a varying set of behaviors is error, because then one is forced to conclude it is anger if the behavior corresponds with the definition of angry behavior. Forced opinions are a logic error, because basically they assert that a choice is free and forced, which is an error of contradiction.

But one can first judge a general behavior to be an expression of anger, like stomping feet, so then you have a preformed judgment. Then when someone stomps their feet, you only have to decide if or not to follow your preformed judgment.

That's basically how the laws in court work, they are preformed judgements about what's right and wrong.

Quoting Isaac

the point is that we can be wrong about our emotions not just in the sense that they're not suited to our modern world (that idea has been around for years) but that they're not 'suited' to any world, they don't come pre-packaged and suited to some set of circumstances predicted by evolution

Isaac DESTROYS evolutionary psychology. (Maybe).

How I'm thinking about emotions in the natural kind flavour are that they are attractors in the dynamical system of active inference given the statistical regularities of our current lifestyles. So, a dynamical system is a pair of collections, a collection of parameters; called states, like the state of a neuron; and a collection of update rules that maps states to other states; an application of an update rule moves a state "forward in time".

Like if you had the parameter x, and the update rule f(x)=x^2, if the initial value of x is 2, then the updates are f(2)=2^2=4, f(4)=4^2=16, f(16)=16^2=196 and so on. The "time" there is how many times the update rule f is applied.

An attractor in a dynamical system is a collection of states that map into themselves under the update rule. You can't escape it, like a ball rolling to the bottom of a hill. For the above map f(x)=x^2, 1 would be an attractor, as would 0, since f(1)=1^2=1 and f(0)=0^2=0.

A more complicated attractor might be whether an asteroid would enter into orbit around Earth. It'll come from some angle, and when it non-negligibly gets pulled by Earth's gravity, it might start to rotate around Earth. The attractor there would be the collection of all orbits around Earth that the asteroids take.

The collection of states in the active inference model is the collection of states it references, the update rules are the state transitions (what we predict them to be and what our interventions reveal about them intermingling into learning). I'm unclear whether "state" refers to something like the state of a neuron, or whether it refers to something like the state of an environmental parameter, or whether at one stage in the process it refers to an environmental parameter (well, in its encoded form) and at others it refers to neuron states. The active inference system's dynamics also don't seem to have exact state access, like the above square map "knows" that 1 comes in as input, what goes into the update rule in the active inference system looks to be an uncertain summary of each state (from a previous prediction). Anyway.

The system described regarding habit formation in the Friston paper you linked doesn't have this "gets stuck there forever" property regarding habits though, a prior becomes change resistant by having its updates diminished by previous success using the policies (actions/worldly interventions, in the paper foraging strategies in a maze) it proposes. So thinking of emotions (not core affect alone) as learned, they would need to be change resistant habits that activate based upon context similarity to the predictions (bodily-environmental model) their representations/encoded patterns generate. When evidence accumulates that the activating context for the habit is no longer present, the agent switches to an exploratory mode that yields the formation of new habits.

If we take that idea that new context recognition is impeded by having a strong prior for what context we're in and what to do in it, it seems to me to fit quite neatly with Barrett's "language-as-a-context" view (from here, the language paper you linked).

In addition, emotion words cause a perceptual shift in the way that faces are seen. Morphed faces depicting an equal blend of happiness and anger are encoded as angrier when those faces are paired with the word ‘angry’, and they are encoded as even angrier when participants are asked to explain why those faces are angry [19].

Language seems to have the ability to prime which habits are simulated and enacted; and language as a cultural artifact/shared repository of symbols and meanings changes much more slowly than the fleeting associations that shape our emerging experience of emotions. It's a relatively time stable network of associations we partake in by analogous simulations. Moreover, language plays a mediating role in valuation of core affect. So: it changes slowly, it primes for which habits to activate by being a context, it mediates valuation in accordance with its own system of associations. It also seems to amplify predictions/interventions that are more typical of it when it's used as a prime (people primed with angry words report faces as more angry).

That seems to give language the power to canalise the developmental landscape of our emotions. It pulls core affect, through valuation, towards that which it typifies. That makes emotions like "anger", "sadness", despite having variable content, look a lot like attractors to me.

Emotions are tied up in identity, and identity can't really be explained. It just is what it is and is self-explanatory. You can talk about inputs and outputs all day, but that will explain nothing as far as emotions filtered through a particular identity.

There isn't one standard for anger or love. There are as many variants of emotion as there are people.

Quoting javra

you seem unable to provide an account of how we arrive at the conclusion that decisions, thoughts, and feelings occur in the first place.

We seem to be talking past each other. We approach these issues in very different ways. I'll try to explain my approach or view, though I expect you disagree with it.

When someone asks me for an account of how we arrive at the conclusion that decisions, thoughts and feelings occur in the first place, I have a tendency to wonder, first, whether there is any doubt that they occur. Only a faux doubt a la Descartes, I think, who famously and I think unfortunately wondered, in effect, how we arrive at the conclusion that we exist.

I think nobody really doubts that what we call decisions, thoughts and feelings occur in the sense that we make them, have them. So this becomes what? A search for their causes? That's a search I think we can engage in usefully even as to what we don't doubt takes place. But you refer to "an account of how we arrive at the conclusion that decisions, thoughts and feelings occur in the first place." I don't know how to interpret that as anything but an account of how we conclude that we make decisions, have thoughts and have feelings. Which is to say, an account of how we conclude that what we don't actually doubt takes place does, indeed, take place. I find it hard to conceive of a reason for seeking or making such an account, nor is it clear to me we can in any meaningful sense. If that means I lack the philosophical attitude, so be it.

I think what we call decisions, thought and feelings, and anything else we say we do or have, arise from living in the world. They're the results of our interaction with the environment of which we're a part. We don't discern or realize or perceive them, or conclude they occur, any more than we discern or realize or perceive or conclude that we're coughing.

]

Reply to Ciceronianus the White

It has nothing to do with doubt. It has to do with how we obtain conscious knowledge of our decisions, thoughts, and feelings given our supposed unawareness of them, as well as our supposed unawareness of ourselves as actively deciding, thinking, or feeling.

And if you will recall the two initial posts you took issue with, my entire argument pivoted on decisions, thoughts, and some certain emotions not being perceptions – hence on our knowledge of these not being empirical. It would be a strawman to claim that I’ve been presenting these as perceptual.

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

We seem to be talking past each other.

It seems to be so to me as well.

Quoting fdrake

Isaac DESTROYS evolutionary psychology. (Maybe).

Ha! It was asking for it, it spilled my pint.

Quoting fdrake

How I'm thinking about emotions in the natural kind flavour are that they are attractors in the dynamical system of active inference given the statistical regularities of our current lifestyles.

Yes, that's it exactly. The essentialist rhetorically asks "Why are expressions of happiness (smiling, laughing, dancing...) similar across the world?" . But the answer is not because it is some natural kind as they might hope. It's because it's a statistical regularity of some basic aspects of human culture. The same can even be said even of biological regularities. Turing's reaction-diffusion equations for example are the basic explanation for most skin and shell pattering in nature - nearly. They explain them sufficiently to be regarded as the source of the regularity, but not quite sufficiently to be predictive with 100% success. If I were to bet on how a shell pattern might come out given the mechanics of it's growth, I'd bet on the patten generated by reaction-diffusion equations, but they're just a statistical aggregate, not complete description. So what I'm saying is that I don't think the re-imagining of classes as statistical summaries here is limited to cultural artefacts - as you mentioned to me earlier, this is all about population thinking.

It turns out, that one of the factors which disrupts the influence of reaction-diffusion equations on skin patterns is temperature. It changes the chemical reactions in the cells sufficiently to break them out of that particular pigmentation reaction. I think with emotion and emotional responses, we have a kind of Nash equilibria which we've learnt, so we're reluctant to change strategy, but similar to the skin pigmentation patterns, there exist environmental variables which shift us out of that algorithm.

Quoting fdrake

A more complicated attractor might be whether an asteroid would enter into orbit around Earth. It'll come from some angle, and when it non-negligibly gets pulled by Earth's gravity, it might start to rotate around Earth. The attractor there would be the collection of all orbits around Earth that the asteroids take.

Have you read any Jack Cohen? He applies the sort of maths you're referring to here to biology (from a mechanistic point of view - how mechanisms in biology like cell mitosis yield semi-chaotic results, but with strange attractors toward the familiar end results).

Quoting fdrake

I'm unclear whether "state" refers to something like the state of a neuron, or whether it refers to something like the state of an environmental parameter, or whether at one stage in the process it refers to an environmental parameter (well, in its encoded form) and at others it refers to neuron states.

I think the 'state' of an environmental parameter is outside of the Markov blanket, so we're only dealing with states of neural cortices. The initiation is from the signal (from the eye, skin, nociceptors, etc) which originates in the exterior world, but does not necessarily represent it (it will be an extract, biased by the the response from the previous inference). I'm aware of the fact that we have an unfinished discussion about the extent to which it does represent it - I don't think we quite agreed on it. Incidentally, @javra I think this is where you're misinterpreting what Barrett means.

Quoting javra

my entire argument pivoted on decisions, thoughts, and some certain emotions not being perceptions – hence on our knowledge of these not being empirical.

Barret is presenting a theory of cognitive processing, not epistemology. As such, none of the inputs are empirical in the sense you're using here. The inputs into the active inference models are all hidden variables outside of the Markov blanket for the system. Perception inference systems deal with raw signals (not raw data - that would require interpretation, which hasn't happened yet). The emotion related cortices are only dealing with signals fro other parts of the brain, so when Barrett refers to perception and interoception, she's referring to signals from parts of the brain responsible for predicting the cause of such raw inputs, not the raw inputs themselves. So introducing signals from other parts of the brain has little to no effect on her model.

Anyway,

Quoting fdrake

The system described regarding habit formation in the Friston paper you linked doesn't have this "gets stuck there forever" property regarding habits though, a prior becomes change resistant by having its updates diminished by previous success using the policies (actions/worldly interventions, in the paper foraging strategies in a maze) it proposes.

Indeed, but does what I've talked about above bring other biological systems a little closer the Friston's habits? I think there's not such a dividing line as all biological systems seem to be behave like this. Priors for predicting the patterns of a seashell seem stuck in reaction-diffusion equations - until temperature increases beyond the threshold for the model. But that's an aside - I see what you're getting at here.

Quoting fdrake

So thinking of emotions (not core affect alone) as learned, they would need to be change resistant habits that activate based upon context similarity to the predictions (bodily-environmental model) their representations/encoded patterns generate. When evidence accumulates that the activating context for the habit is no longer present, the agent switches to an exploratory mode that yields the formation of new habits.

Exactly. And how many other mental habits fit into this pattern. We have emotion and learning thus far. Logic? Embodied training (like riding a bike)?

Quoting fdrake

Language seems to have the ability to prime which habits are simulated and enacted; and language as a cultural artifact/shared repository of symbols and meanings changes much more slowly than the fleeting associations that shape our emerging experience of emotions. It's a relatively time stable network of associations we partake in by analogous simulations. Moreover, language plays a mediating role in valuation of core affect. So: it changes slowly, it primes for which habits to activate by being a context, it mediates valuation in accordance with its own system of associations. It also seems to amplify predictions/interventions that are more typical of it when it's used as a prime (people primed with angry words report faces as more angry).

Yeah, how can you express an emotion that's somewhere between anger and fear when your entire language, you're whole means of talking (and possibly even thinking) about the world doesn't contain a word for such a feeling? Like with Wittgenstein's talk about 'pain'. We're not only using the word to describe the socially shared experience, the mere existence of the word is acting as a resistor to updating or modifying that experience too quickly, which is necessary for communication to work.

What interests me here, is the extent to which this resistance to change from a predicable pattern actually serves a social function of it's own. Like the influence the word 'pain' has on our ability to express nuances of feeling actually serves a function (if we each had our own unique word to define 'our' pain, we'd never be able to talk about it). emotions are, at least in a large part, a means of social communication. It's possible that some of the restrictions society places of the classification are acting in a similar way - constraining private variety to make public expression meaningful?

Quoting Isaac

It's possible that some of the restrictions society places of the classification are acting in a similar way - constraining private variety to make public expression meaningful?

Like all social constructs, agreement or uniformity is important to function, and the price of being out of sync with the socially constructed emotional world is an imbalanced body budget (stress).