Ok, now a post on motivation, affect, and emotion: attempting to explain sex, money, and pizza. Then I’ll try a post on some of my own theories/ideas regarding some stuff. Together, I’m hoping these two posts address the Dark Room Problem in a sufficient way. HEY SCOTT, you’ll want to read this, because I’m going to link a paper giving a better explanation of depression than I think Friston posits.
The following ideas come from one of my advisers who studies emotion. I may bungle it, because our class on the embodied neuroscience of this stuff hasn’t gotten too far.
The core of “emotion” is really this thing we call core affect, and it’s actually the core job of the brain, any biological brain, at all. This is: regulate the states of the internal organs (particularly the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems) to keep the viscera functioning well and the organism “doing its job” (survival and reproduction).
What is “its job”? Well, that’s where we actually get programmed-in, innate “priors” that express goals. Her idea is, evolution endows organisms with some nice idea of what internal organ states are good, in terms of valence (goodness/badness) and arousal (preparedness for action or inaction, potentially: emphasis on the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system’s regulatory functions). You can think of arousal and sympathetic/parasympathetic as composing a spectrum between the counterposed poles of “fight or flight” and “rest, digest, reproduce”. Spending time in an arousal state affects your internal physiology, so it then affects valence. We now get one of the really useful, interesting empirical predictions to fall right out: young and healthy people like spending time in high-arousal states, while older or less healthy people prefer low-arousal states. That is, even provided you’re in a pleasurable state, young people will prefer more active pleasures (sports, video gaming, sex) while old people will prefer passive pleasures (sitting on the porch with a drink yelling at children). Since this is all physiology, basically everything impacts it: what you eat, how you socialize, how often you mate.
The brain is thus a specialized organ with a specific job: to proactively, predictively regulate those internal states (allostasis), because reactively regulating them (homeostasis) doesn’t work as well). Note that the brain how has its own metabolic demands and arousal/relaxation spectrum, giving rise to bounded rationality in the brain’s Bayesian modeling and feelings like boredom or mental tiredness. The brain’s regulation of the internal organs proceeds via closed-loop predictive control, which can be made really accurate and computationally efficient. We observe anatomically that the interoceptive (internal perception) and visceromotor (exactly what it says on the tin) networks in the brain are at the “core”, seemingly at the “highest level” of the predictive model, and basically control almost everything else in the name of keeping your physiology in the states prescribed as positive by evolution as useful proxies for survival and reproduction.
Get this wrong, however, and the brain-body system can wind up in an accidental positive feedback that moves it over to a new equilibrium of consistently negative valence with either consistent high arousal (anxiety) or consistent low arousal (depression). Depression and anxiety thus result from the brain continually getting the impression that the body is in shitty, low-energy, low-activity states, and then sending internal motor commands designed to correct the problem, which actually, due to brain miscalibration, make it worse. You sleep too much, you eat too much or too little, you don’t go outside, you misattribute negative valence to your friends when it’s actually your job, etc. Things like a healthy diet, exercise, and sunlight can try to bring the body closer to genuinely optimal physiological states, which helps it yell at the brain that actually you’re healthy now and it should stuff fucking shit up by misallocating physiological resources.
“Emotions” wind up being something vaguely like your “mood” (your core affect system’s assessment of your internal physiology’s valence and arousal) combined with a causal “appraisal” done by the brain using sensory data, combined with a physiological and external plan of action issued by the brain.
You’re not motivated to sit in a Dark Room because the “predictions” that your motor systems care about are internal, physiological hyperparameters which can only be revised to a very limited extent, or which can be interpreted as some form of reinforcement signalling. You go into a Dark Room and your external (exteroceptive, in neuro-speak) senses have really low surprise, but your internal senses and internal motor systems are yelling that your organs say shit’s fucked up. Since your organs say shit’s fucked up, “surprise” is now very high, and you need to go change your external sensory and motor variables to deal with that shit.
Note that you can sometimes seek out calming, boring external sensory states, because your brain has demanded a lot from your metabolism and physiology lately, so it’s “out of energy” and you need to “relax your mind”.
Pizza becomes positively valenced when you are hungry, especially if you’re low on fats and glucose. Sex becomes most salient when your parasympathetic nervous system is dominant: your body believes that it’s safe, and the resources available for action can now be devoted to reproduction over survival.
Note that the actual physiological details here could, once again, be very crude approximations of the truth or straight-up wrong, because our class just hasn’t gotten far enough to really hammer everything in.
Ok, now a post on motivation, affect, and emotion: attempting to explain sex, money, and pizza. Then I’ll try a post on some of my own theories/ideas regarding some stuff. Together, I’m hoping these two posts address the Dark Room Problem in a sufficient way. HEY SCOTT, you’ll want to read this, because I’m going to link a paper giving a better explanation of depression than I think Friston posits.
The following ideas come from one of my advisers who studies emotion. I may bungle it, because our class on the embodied neuroscience of this stuff hasn’t gotten too far.
The core of “emotion” is really this thing we call core affect, and it’s actually the core job of the brain, any biological brain, at all. This is: regulate the states of the internal organs (particularly the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems) to keep the viscera functioning well and the organism “doing its job” (survival and reproduction).
What is “its job”? Well, that’s where we actually get programmed-in, innate “priors” that express goals. Her idea is, evolution endows organisms with some nice idea of what internal organ states are good, in terms of valence (goodness/badness) and arousal (preparedness for action or inaction, potentially: emphasis on the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system’s regulatory functions). You can think of arousal and sympathetic/parasympathetic as composing a spectrum between the counterposed poles of “fight or flight” and “rest, digest, reproduce”. Spending time in an arousal state affects your internal physiology, so it then affects valence. We now get one of the really useful, interesting empirical predictions to fall right out: young and healthy people like spending time in high-arousal states, while older or less healthy people prefer low-arousal states. That is, even provided you’re in a pleasurable state, young people will prefer more active pleasures (sports, video gaming, sex) while old people will prefer passive pleasures (sitting on the porch with a drink yelling at children). Since this is all physiology, basically everything impacts it: what you eat, how you socialize, how often you mate.
The brain is thus a specialized organ with a specific job: to proactively, predictively regulate those internal states (allostasis), because reactively regulating them (homeostasis) doesn’t work as well). Note that the brain how has its own metabolic demands and arousal/relaxation spectrum, giving rise to bounded rationality in the brain’s Bayesian modeling and feelings like boredom or mental tiredness. The brain’s regulation of the internal organs proceeds via closed-loop predictive control, which can be made really accurate and computationally efficient. We observe anatomically that the interoceptive (internal perception) and visceromotor (exactly what it says on the tin) networks in the brain are at the “core”, seemingly at the “highest level” of the predictive model, and basically control almost everything else in the name of keeping your physiology in the states prescribed as positive by evolution as useful proxies for survival and reproduction.
Get this wrong, however, and the brain-body system can wind up in an accidental positive feedback that moves it over to a new equilibrium of consistently negative valence with either consistent high arousal (anxiety) or consistent low arousal (depression). Depression and anxiety thus result from the brain continually getting the impression that the body is in shitty, low-energy, low-activity states, and then sending internal motor commands designed to correct the problem, which actually, due to brain miscalibration, make it worse. You sleep too much, you eat too much or too little, you don’t go outside, you misattribute negative valence to your friends when it’s actually your job, etc. Things like a healthy diet, exercise, and sunlight can try to bring the body closer to genuinely optimal physiological states, which helps it yell at the brain that actually you’re healthy now and it should stuff fucking shit up by misallocating physiological resources.
“Emotions” wind up being something vaguely like your “mood” (your core affect system’s assessment of your internal physiology’s valence and arousal) combined with a causal “appraisal” done by the brain using sensory data, combined with a physiological and external plan of action issued by the brain.
You’re not motivated to sit in a Dark Room because the “predictions” that your motor systems care about are internal, physiological hyperparameters which can only be revised to a very limited extent, or which can be interpreted as some form of reinforcement signalling. You go into a Dark Room and your external (exteroceptive, in neuro-speak) senses have really low surprise, but your internal senses and internal motor systems are yelling that your organs say shit’s fucked up. Since your organs say shit’s fucked up, “surprise” is now very high, and you need to go change your external sensory and motor variables to deal with that shit.
Note that you can sometimes seek out calming, boring external sensory states, because your brain has demanded a lot from your metabolism and physiology lately, so it’s “out of energy” and you need to “relax your mind”.
Pizza becomes positively valenced when you are hungry, especially if you’re low on fats and glucose. Sex becomes most salient when your parasympathetic nervous system is dominant: your body believes that it’s safe, and the resources available for action can now be devoted to reproduction over survival.
Note that the actual physiological details here could, once again, be very crude approximations of the truth or straight-up wrong, because our class just hasn’t gotten far enough to really hammer everything in.