We are born with emotions in place — Colin Cooper

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

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. — Barrett - Are Emotions Natural Kinds?

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?"). — fdrake

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.

Indeed, much of it sounds like reheated Wittgenstein. Does she acknowledge the influence at least? — jkg20

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.

pretend you’re defending blue-collar workers and the poor as you tacitly advocate for the criminalization of their livelihoods. — NOS4A2

Can't have a livelihood when you're dead. It's in the name, see.

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.

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? — Banno

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...

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. — Banno

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:

"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)." — Barrett - The Theory of Constructed Emotion

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.

Yeah, but "StreetlightX" refers to StreetlightX in a way that "1" does not refer to 1. — Banno

I suppose, but only because it's used that way right now.

I guess - to be less facetious - I don't want math to be anything all that special. It's a language too. The distinction in use between "StreetlightX" and "1" is intra-linguistic, and not between language and some other, special script.

But otherwise yes, "1" obviously doesn't refer to anything at all.

Go big or go home Banno - nothing refers to anything, not even words! - unless used in that way, of course.

It's as they say about guns: words and numbers don't refer, people do.

And how anyone can look at 2,700 deaths in one day and say, "Time to open everything up!" is just utterly beyond me. — Baden

The rich are not getting their promised ROI. Gotta sacrifice a few (tens or hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers, predominantly african-americans) to get the ball rolling again. It's the American Way - shit on your blacks and poor for some dough.

Also, NOS caught on a lie? Ping me when he's caught on a truth.

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. — fdrake

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.

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? — Isaac

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.

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

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.

The Trump campaign has a bunch of boomers who have just discovered memes placing white text on American flags and skulls while they herp-derp amongst each other. It's as sophisticated as a smear of shit on a buttcheek. Not to say it doesn't work.

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” — Ciceronianus the White

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.

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? ' — csalisbury

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

What does this miss? — csalisbury

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.

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

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.

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 — Coben

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.

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. — Possibility

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.

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? — Hanover

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:

"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”" — Adrian Johnson - Affects Are Signifiers

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:

"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 — FB - How Emotions Are Made

(my bolding).

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

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. — Possibility

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):

"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." — FB

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.

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? — schopenhauer1

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!:

"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. — Feldman Barrett, 'Solving

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.

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

Nope. [PDF]

(Although the findings here surprised me too!).

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. — Possibility

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").

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 — Colin Cooper

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

From a commentator I follow on social media:

"If you look at Joe Biden's central role in expanding the prison industrial complex, shepherding university students into debt peonage, and pushing the U.S into war with Iraq, it seems clear that he is responsible for as much (if not more) death and social misery as Trump. The liberal push to get people to support him as a "lesser evil" is not harm reduction; it is harm legitimation. Rather than asking "why isn't the Left backing Biden?", we should ask: "why are so many liberals so deeply invested in normalizing cruelty?"

Someone else in the comments mentioned that it was policies of the likes which Biden pushed and supported that effectively spawned Trump anyway - which I think is entirely on point and makes laughable the idea that Biden is alternative to Trump rather than a condition and an accelerator of Trumpism. Either one belongs to one pole in two-sided, mutually implicating death spiral.

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

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).

M. Merleau-Ponty — 180 Proof

Nah man, M-P is everywhere.

With Sartre it is like with Freud, everyone abominates them, but everyone uses concepts like bad faith, condemned to be free, hell is the others, etc. that have come from Sartre. There must be be a reason for that. — David Mo

I was going to mention exactly this. Just as Freudian lingo is part and parcel of everyday vocabulary (unconscious, libido, ego, id, on the couch, etc), so too is Sartre's language part of the furniture, even though he's not studied all that much. The return of the repressed.

Also America is simply a plutocracy with a weak democratic spitshine (this is what 'trickles down') so no, don't blame 'the people'.

I guess when your country is founded by a paedophile slaver rapist like Jefferson that's why it turns out the way it does: with a 2020 election choice between two additional rapists.

:flower:

Liberate!! ... Souls from bodies or something.

And in case anyone had any doubt about the small-minded anemia of the Obama administration:

"To his most hopeful followers, Obama’s unique gift was being able to turn soaring statements of principle into simple truths of politics, marrying a national inheritance of social movements from below to a plainspoken pragmatism from above. There was something to that view, but it never reckoned with the fact that Obama’s radicalism was, from the very beginning, bound up with a narrow notion of what politics was about. His was a vision less of power than of process, the culmination of twenty years of political theory journals where democracy was deliberation and deliberation was democracy. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan won election by promising to crush a systemic social malignancy: the slaveocracy, economic royalists, a parasitic class of liberal elites. Unlike these transformative presidents of left and right, Obama disavowed any structural transformations of society or the economy. Even when it came to race, as Obama’s most electrifying speech (on Jeremiah Wright) made clear, his vision of change was almost completely divorced from the social bases of power. His goal was to help both sides understand each other, to make our conversations better.

... As men and women watched their life savings go up in smoke and their homes disappear into foreclosure, Obama hailed the “power” of the market, declaring in his first inaugural address that capitalism’s capacity “to generate wealth and expand freedom” was “unmatched.” Encouraging free enterprise and rewarding individual initiative, he said in his 2013 State of the Union address, was the “unfinished task” of government. That was the positive vision. Just as often, he was reminding the left and reassuring the right of his belief in the limitations of government. Even as he affirmed his commitment to enforcing federal laws against discrimination, he was convinced “that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers.” His famous phrase, “Hard things are hard,” which was made into a plaque he kept on his desk, was not a reference to the Affordable Care Act, as is commonly believed. According to top strategist David Axelrod, it was a reference to entitlement cuts, to Obama’s genuine desire to impose some kind of austerity on Social Security and Medicare in return for a deal with the Republicans on taxes and the debt. Thankfully, the Republicans refused it.

... Obama’s public philosophy: a moral minimalism that rendered him not so much ill-prepared for a fight with the Republicans as ideologically indisposed to the very idea of a fight. “Yes we can” was a sonorous but empty phrase: yes we can what? When Obama got concrete, he might stay in that register of grandness—there was that moment when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, and so on—but more often than not he opted for unapologetic avowals of smallness. “The true genius of America,” he told the DNC in 2004, is “an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm.” No one-off, that turn to the slight but simple truth of children being safe was a recurring theme of Obama’s presidency, arguably its epistemological ground. “There’s only one thing we can be sure of,” he said after Sandy Hook, “and that is the love that we have for our children. . . . The warmth of a small child’s embrace, that is true.” These were not just comforting words to a grief-stricken nation. They emanated from the idiom of bare life, the wariness of deep foundations that had come to characterize liberalism in the wake of the New Deal order and the end of the Cold War.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that such a smallness of vision could never withstand the largeness of the right. But, for Obama, opposing largeness with smallness was the point. In this age of Trump and Twitter, it’s easy to forget the exhaustion of the electorate after the foreign wars of Bush and the domestic wars of Rove. Obama was keenly attuned to it. Rather than depict the Republicans as revanchists, he chose to describe them as irresponsible and grandiose, reckless adventurers who fought extravagant wars they didn’t pay for and squandered a surplus they hadn’t earned. Theirs was a “politics of anything goes,” he said, a bacchanal of waste and war. They were dangerous and dumb and out of control; he was safe and smart and in control. After eight years of operatic conflict, the last thing Americans wanted was more. What they wanted was less. That’s what Obama promised them—action that was “imperfect,” victories that were “partial”—and no amount of Republican wilding would stop him from keeping that promise. Even if it meant the peace of a graveyard, the quiet of a tomb."

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-obamanauts

Carter? Who at every turn did what he could to undermine the Sandinistas and pave the way for the Contras and their murderous regime? (Cemented by Reagan of course). Worth mentioning that Cater literally committed a war crime when flying Nicaraguan National Guard (who eventually become the Contras) out of the country under the banner of the Red Cross. The same Carter who effectively created the Mujahadeen which eventually became Al Qaeda and further along, ISIS? The same Carter who materially and financially assisted Sukarno as he slaughtered civilians in East Timor? Nah, Carter was a prick like the rest of them.

Lecture me about knowing my history. Wanker.

Nah [#####]. You don't get to accuse someone of racism on no basis and then pretend you want to have a level conversion. [######]

Besides laundering the CCP’s image, spreading their misinformation ... we get another lesson in the eternal efforts to disguise a failed and bloody political ideology. — NOS4A2

Yes but enough about Trump, what about the WHO?

Get [####] you piece of [####]

Accuse me of racism again on the basis of a post that has nothing to do with race and I will [##############]

But again, all of this is merely to say "WHO BAD, WHO BAD!". They're not perfect, and I'm sure they've made countless mistakes since the start of this pandemic, but we're not debating the WHO's performance, we're debating whether withholding funding is a sane thing to do in the middle of a pandemic. — VagabondSpectre

To be fair, insofar as Trump downplayed the effects of the virus to a far greater - and more deadly - extent than the WHO, it'd only be consistent if Trump suspended his own presidency while a People's Commission investigated his own handling of CV. Suspended from a bridge, preferably.

I dunno, I'm not super well versed in the American presidency. They probably all are, given that America has always been an imperial warmongering nation.