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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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. — Barrett, “How Emotions Are Made’

Skim read closer! — StreetlightX

:up:

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.

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. — jkg20

Where does it say that emotions are states?

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?

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

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.

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. — StreetlightX

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.

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. — StreetlightX

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).

...the machine of active inference... — fdrake

Uh uh.

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.

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 .

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. — 3017amen

Very Schopenhaurian of you! :grin:

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 — Colin Cooper

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.

Very Schopenhaurian of you! :grin: — schopenhauer1

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 !

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

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.

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. — fdrake

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).

Have you considered metaphysical Voluntarism? Meaning, the intellect is subordinate to the Will — 3017amen

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.

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. 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.

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?

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

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.

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? — jkg20

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.

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."

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.