Waves and symmetries don’t carry many bits of information. If you think valence and suffering are fundamentally few-dimensional, maybe that doesn’t bother you; but I think it’s at least possible for people know whether they’re suffering from arm pain or finger pain or air-hunger or guilt or whatever.
“What is the problem?” should have a pretty high information content, but there might be a separate “how bad is it?” question that constitutes the actual unpleasant part of the experience, which wouldn’t have to be much more than a 1d scalar.
For the record, I do actually believe that. I was trying to state what seemed to be a problem in the STV framework as I was understanding it.
In my picture, the brainstem communicates valence to the neocortex via a midbrain dopamine signal (one particular signal of the many), and sometimes communicates the suggested cause / remediation via executing orienting reactions (saccading, moving your head, etc.—the brainstem can do this by itself), and sending acetylcholine to the corresponding parts of your cortex, which then override the normal top-down attention mechanism and force attention onto whatever your brainstem demands. For example, when your finger hurts a lot, it’s really hard to think about anything else, and my tentative theory is that the mechanism here involves the brainstem sending acetylcholine to the finger-pain-area of the insular cortex. (To be clear, this is casual speculation that I haven’t thought too hard about or looked into much.)
“What is the problem?” should have a pretty high information content, but there might be a separate “how bad is it?” question that constitutes the actual unpleasant part of the experience, which wouldn’t have to be much more than a 1d scalar.
For the record, I do actually believe that. I was trying to state what seemed to be a problem in the STV framework as I was understanding it.
In my picture, the brainstem communicates valence to the neocortex via a midbrain dopamine signal (one particular signal of the many), and sometimes communicates the suggested cause / remediation via executing orienting reactions (saccading, moving your head, etc.—the brainstem can do this by itself), and sending acetylcholine to the corresponding parts of your cortex, which then override the normal top-down attention mechanism and force attention onto whatever your brainstem demands. For example, when your finger hurts a lot, it’s really hard to think about anything else, and my tentative theory is that the mechanism here involves the brainstem sending acetylcholine to the finger-pain-area of the insular cortex. (To be clear, this is casual speculation that I haven’t thought too hard about or looked into much.)