OK. That story does make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t require nesting, but just combining (“multiplying”) two signals that are present at the same time. To check that I understand: That hypothetical cell group reinforces positive thoughts about another person focused on them co-occurring with positive thoughts about another person focused on oneself, correct?
That should be testable! The co-occurrence time can’t be too long, so separating the parts of the thought sufficiently should make it less rewarding. That can plausibly be tested retrospectively as well as traditionally with neuroimaging. The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS). See Neural activity associated with self-reflection. It should also be possible to implement this in simulated agents.
I dunno … I think much of human cognition involves rapid-fire sequences of several “thoughts” within a fraction of a second, and those “thoughts” all blend together on fMRI because the time-resolution of fMRI is bad. EEG & MEG have much better time resolution but much worse spatial resolution. ECoG is a bit better but rare. Etc. Then there’s a bunch of monkey experiments, and even more rodent experiments, but those are hard to interpret in this context (e.g. you can’t ask monkeys what they’re thinking about; instead scientists tend to make things up and I often wind up thinking they got it wrong). I guess it’s not entirely impossible that something useful could be gleaned from EEG/MEG experiments. I haven’t looked into that.
The real goldmine would be finding the relevant cluster of cells in (I’d guess) the hypothalamus, but that would be extraordinarily hard in humans. There’s almost no data on the human hypothalamus. Not too much in monkeys either (although I haven’t yet tried looking specifically, it’s on my to-do list), and rodents might not even have a “drive to feel liked / admired” in the first place.
Also, I’m not sure I agree with “The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS).” For example, your link in the next sentence talks about TPJ activation during “self-reflection and -perception” (they call it “inferior parietal lobule” rather than “TPJ” but IPL is a subset of TPJ, and it’s the subset which is relevant to this discussion, IMO). And conversely here’s a paper mentioning PCC in the context of “emotional empathy”.
Again, I do hope to spend some time thinking in more detail about the neuroscience implementation of the alleged “drive to feel liked / admired”, and probably write another post. Hopefully this would happen in the next couple months. So I appreciate the discussion, keep it coming :)
(I can’t follow your first paragraph enough to agree or disagree, sorry.)
OK, let’s forget about the testability via neuroscience. But it could be testable by introspection. One could ask people how admiring they consider different scenarios and the scenarios would be constructed in a way that the two thoughts are separated in time to different degrees. It should also be possible to construct though sequences that are superficially not about admiration, but should also trigger the feeling.
Zoe would be very proud of what I did this morning. = I’m thinking about Zoe (is-person) from my own perspective (spatial attention far) + I think of something positive in Zoe’s mind (is-person) about me (spatial attention near)
Zoe was feeling good while I was watching her.
= same pattern (should also feel like admiration).
Zoe was proud, but I forgot about what it was. Ah yes, it was something I did this morning.
= same pattern, but more separated in time.
It is, of course, likely in the latter case that people construct the co-occurring thoughts, but the admiration should, on average, feel less.
OK. That story does make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t require nesting, but just combining (“multiplying”) two signals that are present at the same time. To check that I understand: That hypothetical cell group reinforces positive thoughts about another person focused on them co-occurring with positive thoughts about another person focused on oneself, correct?
That should be testable! The co-occurrence time can’t be too long, so separating the parts of the thought sufficiently should make it less rewarding. That can plausibly be tested retrospectively as well as traditionally with neuroimaging. The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS). See Neural activity associated with self-reflection. It should also be possible to implement this in simulated agents.
I dunno … I think much of human cognition involves rapid-fire sequences of several “thoughts” within a fraction of a second, and those “thoughts” all blend together on fMRI because the time-resolution of fMRI is bad. EEG & MEG have much better time resolution but much worse spatial resolution. ECoG is a bit better but rare. Etc. Then there’s a bunch of monkey experiments, and even more rodent experiments, but those are hard to interpret in this context (e.g. you can’t ask monkeys what they’re thinking about; instead scientists tend to make things up and I often wind up thinking they got it wrong). I guess it’s not entirely impossible that something useful could be gleaned from EEG/MEG experiments. I haven’t looked into that.
The real goldmine would be finding the relevant cluster of cells in (I’d guess) the hypothalamus, but that would be extraordinarily hard in humans. There’s almost no data on the human hypothalamus. Not too much in monkeys either (although I haven’t yet tried looking specifically, it’s on my to-do list), and rodents might not even have a “drive to feel liked / admired” in the first place.
Also, I’m not sure I agree with “The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS).” For example, your link in the next sentence talks about TPJ activation during “self-reflection and -perception” (they call it “inferior parietal lobule” rather than “TPJ” but IPL is a subset of TPJ, and it’s the subset which is relevant to this discussion, IMO). And conversely here’s a paper mentioning PCC in the context of “emotional empathy”.
Again, I do hope to spend some time thinking in more detail about the neuroscience implementation of the alleged “drive to feel liked / admired”, and probably write another post. Hopefully this would happen in the next couple months. So I appreciate the discussion, keep it coming :)
(I can’t follow your first paragraph enough to agree or disagree, sorry.)
OK, let’s forget about the testability via neuroscience. But it could be testable by introspection. One could ask people how admiring they consider different scenarios and the scenarios would be constructed in a way that the two thoughts are separated in time to different degrees. It should also be possible to construct though sequences that are superficially not about admiration, but should also trigger the feeling.
Zoe would be very proud of what I did this morning.
=
I’m thinking about Zoe (is-person) from my own perspective (spatial attention far)
+
I think of something positive in Zoe’s mind (is-person) about me (spatial attention near)
Zoe was feeling good while I was watching her.
= same pattern (should also feel like admiration).
Zoe was proud, but I forgot about what it was. Ah yes, it was something I did this morning.
= same pattern, but more separated in time.
It is, of course, likely in the latter case that people construct the co-occurring thoughts, but the admiration should, on average, feel less.