There are some good points in this post. However, you have constructed an unwieldy overloading of the word emotion, forging it into phlogiston of your theory. Taboo “emotion”. When you describe the quite real operations performed by human mind, consisting in assigning properties to things and priming to see some properties easier or at all, you bless this description with the action of emotion-substance for some reason.
Somatic markers are effectively a kind of cached thought. They are, in essence, the “tiny XML tags of the mind”, that label things “good” or “bad”, or even “rational” and “irrational”. (Which of course are just disguised versions of “good” and “bad”, if you’re a rationalist.)
[...]
See, it’s not even that only strong emotions do this: weak or momentary emotional responses will do just fine for tagging purposes.
Later, you deny the inference algorithms that don’t contain the emotion-substance.
Without emotions, we couldn’t reason at all.
It doesn’t invalidate the points you are making, but it does make the word somewhat hollow and misleading, especially as it already has a conventional meaning. When you are talking about human brain, the counterfactual situation where you take away the emotions doesn’t make much sense, since the architecture depends on all of its parts working properly. (There are broken brains that can be said to exhibit a measure of this, of course, but that won’t be about the mysterious emotion-substance.) You need to specify a model that has parts or properties corresponding to your use of the elements of your theory. For example, you talked about good and bad emotions in the past, and it’s OK once you specify a model which is driven by good and bad emotions instead of more explicit expected terminal utility computation.
By emotion, I mean, “that which controls the macro-physiological state of the body across multiple control systems, whose effects may be observed through kinesthetic awareness, and which is not a product of direct conscious effort to influence that state.”
Or, in simpler words, “feelings”. ;-)
Evolutionarily, I propose that the function of emotion is to prepare the body for co-ordinated action of some kind—for example, fear prepares for fight/flight and triggers heightened sensory focus.
Other emotions are more cerebral (e.g. the “aha” sensation), but still can be perceived in physical form, often still having externally visible effects, even to the naked eye.
When you describe the quite real operations performed by human mind, consisting in assigning properties to things and priming to see some properties easier or at all, you bless this description with the action of emotion-substance for some reason.
The reason is that brains were not created for us to perform reasoning, they were created to classify things by emotion—that is, to prepare the body for responses appropriate to recognized external events. It’s important to remember that thinking arose after simple memory-prediction-action chains, and that it’s built on top of that legacy system. That’s why emotion (using the definition I gave above) is critical: tagging things with emotions and replaying those emotions upon recall is the primary substance and function of brains.
Yes, there are goal subsystems and all that… but that’s another system (like “thinking”) that’s layered on top of the memory-prediction-action chain.
For example, you talked about good and bad emotions in the past, and it’s OK once you specify a model which is driven by good and bad emotions instead of more explicit expected terminal utility computation.
Certainly—that’s later in the sequence. It was going to be next, but yours and Yvain’s comments make me think that maybe I need to get a bit more explicit about the evolutionary chain here, including the memory-prediction-action core, although maybe I can work that in at the beginning.
The reason is that brains were not created for us to perform reasoning, they were created to classify things by emotion—that is, to prepare the body for responses appropriate to recognized external events. It’s important to remember that thinking arose after simple memory-prediction-action chains, and that it’s built on top of that legacy system. That’s why emotion (using the definition I gave above) is critical: tagging things with emotions and replaying those emotions upon recall is the primary substance and function of brains.
Really, taboo emotion, taboo feelings, taboo anything that allows “all things that are not conscious reasoning” to be compressed to a single word.
I don’t understand your request. Do you want me to list every possible somatic marker?
(Note, btw, that different animals have different somatic marker hierarchies, so that would be a pretty extensive list, if I were even able to compile it.)
In my work, I rarely need to distinguish the nature of an emotion in any finer degree than “toward” or “away”, “good” or “bad”. The difference between (say) somebody feeling “terrible” about their work or “awful” is not important to me, nor do I care what specific somatic markers are involved in marking those concepts either across human beings or even within any given single human being.
However, it is important for the person experiencing that marker to be able to identify the physical components of it, in order to be able to test whether or not an intervention I suggest has actually removed the link between a concept and the marker that gets automatically played back when the concept is thought of. (Since the marker is a preparation for action—including actions such as “hesitation”—changing the marker also changes the behavior associated with the concept… but the markers can be tested much more quickly than full-blown behaviors, allowing for faster feedback in cases where more than one technique might be relevant.)
Thus, “emotion” to me is a testable and predictable concept that governs human motivation in a meaningful way. If somebody wants to give me a better word to use to describe the thing upon which my interventions operate and manifest as physical (muscular, visceral, etc.) sensations in the body, then by all means, suggest away.
I am not a psychology researcher—I help people to fix motivation problems and make personality changes. My work is not to “prove” that a particular hypothesis or physical mechanism is in effect in human beings; it’s to identify practical techniques, and to devise useful models for understanding how those techniques operate and by which new techniques can be developed. Of course, as I find out more about evolution or about experimental results, I incorporate that information into my theoretical models to improve my practical results.
It seems to me that you are asking me to stop using a model that actually works for producing practical results, and to substitute something else—and what that something else is, I’m not sure.
So, I’d appreciate it if you’d explain more specifically what it is you’re asking for, in the form of an actionable request, rather than primarily in the form of what you’d like me not to do.
The reason is that brains were not created for us to perform reasoning, they were created to classify things by emotion—that is, to prepare the body for responses appropriate to recognized external events. It’s important to remember that thinking arose after simple memory-prediction-action chains, and that it’s built on top of that legacy system. That’s why emotion (using the definition I gave above) is critical: tagging things with emotions and replaying those emotions upon recall is the primary substance and function of brains.
You have already said this in the article, and I basically agree with this model. But it doesn’t follow that the categories/responses/tags are in any sense simple. They have the structure of their own, the structure as powerful as any piece of imagination. The structure of these “tags” has complexity still beyond the reach of any scientific investigation hitherto entered upon. ;-) And for this reason it’s an error to write them off as phlogiston, even if you proceed with describing their properties.
And for this reason it’s an error to write them off as phlogiston, even if you proceed with describing their properties.
I’m treating emotion—or better, somatic markers—as a category of thing that is useful to know about. But I have not really needed to have finer distinctions than “good” or “bad”, for practical purposes in teaching people how to modify their markers and change their beliefs, motivations, etc. So, if you’re saying I have too broad a category, I’m saying that in practice, I haven’t needed to have a smaller one.
Frankly, it seems to me that perhaps some people are quibbling about the word “emotion” because they have it labeled “bad”, but I’m also using it to describe things they have labeled “good”. Ergo, I must be using the word incorrectly. (I’d be happy to be wrong about that supposition, of course.)
From my perspective, though, it’s a false dichotomy to split emotion in such a way—it overcomplicates the necessary model of mind, rather than simplifying it.
Frankly, it seems to me that perhaps some people are quibbling about the word “emotion” because they have it labeled “bad”, but I’m also using it to describe things they have labeled “good”. Ergo, I must be using the word incorrectly. (I’d be happy to be wrong about that supposition, of course.)
From my perspective, though, it’s a false dichotomy to split emotion in such a way—it overcomplicates the necessary model of mind, rather than simplifying it.
I agree that the word “emotion” as it’s conventionally used is different form how it’s used here, and overloading the term serves to confuse things, but there’s a relation between the two meanings that’s worth exploring.
To summarize pjeby’s essay as best I can, we generate propositions, which when we think about them activate concepts like “useful” or “truthy”, which are special cases of “good”, or else activate concepts like “convoluted” or “absurd”, which are special cases of “bad”, and whether good or bad markers are active determines whether we continue along the same line or purge it from our working memory.
pjeby treats the goodness or badness of a concept in memory as being emotion, but conventional use of the word emotion refers instead to an aspect of mental state that adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from or recorded to memory. This may be the mechanism by which concepts get tagged in the first place, but the relation between these two meanings is complex enough that assigning them the same word can lead to false conclusions.
Also, there are almost certainly more concepts basic to cognition than just the good/bad spectrum. Other possible tag spectra would be calm/excited, near/far, and certain/uncertain.
To summarize pjeby’s essay as best I can, we generate propositions, which when we think about them activate concepts like “useful” or “truthy”, which are special cases of “good”, or else activate concepts like “convoluted” or “absurd”, which are special cases of “bad”, and whether good or bad markers are active determines whether we continue along the same line or purge it from our working memory.
Yes, and I’m further arguing that these markers are somatic—they exist to effect physical changes in the body.
pjeby treats the goodness or badness of a concept in memory as being emotion, but conventional use of the word emotion refers instead to an aspect of mental state that adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from or recorded to memory.
I don’t even begin to understand this sentence, since in my view, the goodness or badness is represented by emotion—i.e. a somatic marker. And the markers are somatic because in an evolutionary context, goodness or badness had to do with moving towards or away from things: I can eat that, that will eat me, that’s a potential mate, etc.
In a sense, that’s more or less the “root” system from which all other markers derive, although it’s a mistake to treat it like some sort of logical hierarchy, when in fact it’s just a collection of kludges upon kludges (like most everything else that evolution does).
First I should clarify my rather ambiguous remark about mental states affecting perceived goodness and badness as things are retrieved or recorded from memory. What I mean is, the markers which we assign things depend partially on our state of mind. For example, we think of some things as dangerous (tigers, guns, ninjas), and some things as not-dangerous (puppies, phones, secretaries), but some things could go either way (spiders, bottles, policemen), depending on how they’re interpreted. If you’re feeling safe, then you’ll tend to label the border cases as safe; if you’re feeling frightened for unrelated reasons, the border cases will come up as dangerous. In other words, priming applies to somatic markers too, not just semantic ones. Or, as I put it in my previous post, emotional state adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from memory.
If every time you think of something you feel frightened, then you will come to think of that thing as scary, even if the only reason you were frighted at the time was because of some irrelevant other thing. This is what I meant by saying that emotional state affects perceived goodness and badness as it’s recorded to memory.
Yes, and I’m further arguing that these markers are somatic—they exist to effect physical changes in the body.
I’m not so sure about this. They certainly effect behaviors, and those behaviors may have physiological ramifications, but many markers have no effect or only indirect effects. Or you could say that each mechanism in the mind exists to support the body, since they co-evolved, but that would be like saying that my liver exists to support my left thumb; all parts of the body are interdependent, the brain included.
Agreed. I second the request to either taboo “emotion” or define it more precisely.
the counterfactual situation where you take away the emotions doesn’t make much sense
Agreed. The human brain is too much of a mess to imagine subtracting “all traces of emotion” and still have a human brain. Also, the fuzziness of the word emotion makes it hard to decide the truth of such statements.
There are some good points in this post. However, you have constructed an unwieldy overloading of the word emotion, forging it into phlogiston of your theory. Taboo “emotion”. When you describe the quite real operations performed by human mind, consisting in assigning properties to things and priming to see some properties easier or at all, you bless this description with the action of emotion-substance for some reason.
Later, you deny the inference algorithms that don’t contain the emotion-substance.
It doesn’t invalidate the points you are making, but it does make the word somewhat hollow and misleading, especially as it already has a conventional meaning. When you are talking about human brain, the counterfactual situation where you take away the emotions doesn’t make much sense, since the architecture depends on all of its parts working properly. (There are broken brains that can be said to exhibit a measure of this, of course, but that won’t be about the mysterious emotion-substance.) You need to specify a model that has parts or properties corresponding to your use of the elements of your theory. For example, you talked about good and bad emotions in the past, and it’s OK once you specify a model which is driven by good and bad emotions instead of more explicit expected terminal utility computation.
By emotion, I mean, “that which controls the macro-physiological state of the body across multiple control systems, whose effects may be observed through kinesthetic awareness, and which is not a product of direct conscious effort to influence that state.”
Or, in simpler words, “feelings”. ;-)
Evolutionarily, I propose that the function of emotion is to prepare the body for co-ordinated action of some kind—for example, fear prepares for fight/flight and triggers heightened sensory focus.
Other emotions are more cerebral (e.g. the “aha” sensation), but still can be perceived in physical form, often still having externally visible effects, even to the naked eye.
The reason is that brains were not created for us to perform reasoning, they were created to classify things by emotion—that is, to prepare the body for responses appropriate to recognized external events. It’s important to remember that thinking arose after simple memory-prediction-action chains, and that it’s built on top of that legacy system. That’s why emotion (using the definition I gave above) is critical: tagging things with emotions and replaying those emotions upon recall is the primary substance and function of brains.
Yes, there are goal subsystems and all that… but that’s another system (like “thinking”) that’s layered on top of the memory-prediction-action chain.
Certainly—that’s later in the sequence. It was going to be next, but yours and Yvain’s comments make me think that maybe I need to get a bit more explicit about the evolutionary chain here, including the memory-prediction-action core, although maybe I can work that in at the beginning.
Really, taboo emotion, taboo feelings, taboo anything that allows “all things that are not conscious reasoning” to be compressed to a single word.
I don’t understand your request. Do you want me to list every possible somatic marker?
(Note, btw, that different animals have different somatic marker hierarchies, so that would be a pretty extensive list, if I were even able to compile it.)
In my work, I rarely need to distinguish the nature of an emotion in any finer degree than “toward” or “away”, “good” or “bad”. The difference between (say) somebody feeling “terrible” about their work or “awful” is not important to me, nor do I care what specific somatic markers are involved in marking those concepts either across human beings or even within any given single human being.
However, it is important for the person experiencing that marker to be able to identify the physical components of it, in order to be able to test whether or not an intervention I suggest has actually removed the link between a concept and the marker that gets automatically played back when the concept is thought of. (Since the marker is a preparation for action—including actions such as “hesitation”—changing the marker also changes the behavior associated with the concept… but the markers can be tested much more quickly than full-blown behaviors, allowing for faster feedback in cases where more than one technique might be relevant.)
Thus, “emotion” to me is a testable and predictable concept that governs human motivation in a meaningful way. If somebody wants to give me a better word to use to describe the thing upon which my interventions operate and manifest as physical (muscular, visceral, etc.) sensations in the body, then by all means, suggest away.
I am not a psychology researcher—I help people to fix motivation problems and make personality changes. My work is not to “prove” that a particular hypothesis or physical mechanism is in effect in human beings; it’s to identify practical techniques, and to devise useful models for understanding how those techniques operate and by which new techniques can be developed. Of course, as I find out more about evolution or about experimental results, I incorporate that information into my theoretical models to improve my practical results.
It seems to me that you are asking me to stop using a model that actually works for producing practical results, and to substitute something else—and what that something else is, I’m not sure.
So, I’d appreciate it if you’d explain more specifically what it is you’re asking for, in the form of an actionable request, rather than primarily in the form of what you’d like me not to do.
You have already said this in the article, and I basically agree with this model. But it doesn’t follow that the categories/responses/tags are in any sense simple. They have the structure of their own, the structure as powerful as any piece of imagination. The structure of these “tags” has complexity still beyond the reach of any scientific investigation hitherto entered upon. ;-) And for this reason it’s an error to write them off as phlogiston, even if you proceed with describing their properties.
I’m treating emotion—or better, somatic markers—as a category of thing that is useful to know about. But I have not really needed to have finer distinctions than “good” or “bad”, for practical purposes in teaching people how to modify their markers and change their beliefs, motivations, etc. So, if you’re saying I have too broad a category, I’m saying that in practice, I haven’t needed to have a smaller one.
Frankly, it seems to me that perhaps some people are quibbling about the word “emotion” because they have it labeled “bad”, but I’m also using it to describe things they have labeled “good”. Ergo, I must be using the word incorrectly. (I’d be happy to be wrong about that supposition, of course.)
From my perspective, though, it’s a false dichotomy to split emotion in such a way—it overcomplicates the necessary model of mind, rather than simplifying it.
I don’t believe anyone is thinking that.
I agree that the word “emotion” as it’s conventionally used is different form how it’s used here, and overloading the term serves to confuse things, but there’s a relation between the two meanings that’s worth exploring.
To summarize pjeby’s essay as best I can, we generate propositions, which when we think about them activate concepts like “useful” or “truthy”, which are special cases of “good”, or else activate concepts like “convoluted” or “absurd”, which are special cases of “bad”, and whether good or bad markers are active determines whether we continue along the same line or purge it from our working memory.
pjeby treats the goodness or badness of a concept in memory as being emotion, but conventional use of the word emotion refers instead to an aspect of mental state that adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from or recorded to memory. This may be the mechanism by which concepts get tagged in the first place, but the relation between these two meanings is complex enough that assigning them the same word can lead to false conclusions.
Also, there are almost certainly more concepts basic to cognition than just the good/bad spectrum. Other possible tag spectra would be calm/excited, near/far, and certain/uncertain.
Yes, and I’m further arguing that these markers are somatic—they exist to effect physical changes in the body.
I don’t even begin to understand this sentence, since in my view, the goodness or badness is represented by emotion—i.e. a somatic marker. And the markers are somatic because in an evolutionary context, goodness or badness had to do with moving towards or away from things: I can eat that, that will eat me, that’s a potential mate, etc.
In a sense, that’s more or less the “root” system from which all other markers derive, although it’s a mistake to treat it like some sort of logical hierarchy, when in fact it’s just a collection of kludges upon kludges (like most everything else that evolution does).
First I should clarify my rather ambiguous remark about mental states affecting perceived goodness and badness as things are retrieved or recorded from memory. What I mean is, the markers which we assign things depend partially on our state of mind. For example, we think of some things as dangerous (tigers, guns, ninjas), and some things as not-dangerous (puppies, phones, secretaries), but some things could go either way (spiders, bottles, policemen), depending on how they’re interpreted. If you’re feeling safe, then you’ll tend to label the border cases as safe; if you’re feeling frightened for unrelated reasons, the border cases will come up as dangerous. In other words, priming applies to somatic markers too, not just semantic ones. Or, as I put it in my previous post, emotional state adjusts the perceived goodness and badness of things as they are retrieved from memory.
If every time you think of something you feel frightened, then you will come to think of that thing as scary, even if the only reason you were frighted at the time was because of some irrelevant other thing. This is what I meant by saying that emotional state affects perceived goodness and badness as it’s recorded to memory.
I’m not so sure about this. They certainly effect behaviors, and those behaviors may have physiological ramifications, but many markers have no effect or only indirect effects. Or you could say that each mechanism in the mind exists to support the body, since they co-evolved, but that would be like saying that my liver exists to support my left thumb; all parts of the body are interdependent, the brain included.
Agreed. I second the request to either taboo “emotion” or define it more precisely.
Agreed. The human brain is too much of a mess to imagine subtracting “all traces of emotion” and still have a human brain. Also, the fuzziness of the word emotion makes it hard to decide the truth of such statements.