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. — StreetlightX
"Conceptual information about emotion can be thought of as “top-down” and core affect “bottom-up” constraints on the emerging experience of emotion. — Feldman Barrett - Solving the Emotion Paradox
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. — javra
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? — praxis
I can't help thinking how inextricably interlinked the mind and body are, however. — praxis
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. — 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 — 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
I don't believe that the theory of constructed emotion makes that claim or relies on such a notion. — praxis
What set of core affects correlate to the cognitive state of envy? — javra
Here. An number of regions are identified.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811916303792 — 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? — Isaac
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. — javra
Can you elucidate a bit more on that? — 3017amen
Not sure what you may be implying by mentioning bodily states emerging from cognitive states. — praxis
it involves subconscious prediction — praxis
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. — javra
(my bolding)"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" — Solving...
."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 Theory...
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. — 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. — javra
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. — Baden
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 — John Protevi Life, War, Earth
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? — Isaac
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!
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. — Metaphysician Undercover
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. — javra
it involves subconscious prediction
— praxis
To be honest, I find it hard to fathom how a mind could possibly work without these. — javra
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