[From Bruce Nevin (2003.05.21 23:24 EDT)]
Bill Powers (2003.05.21.1418 MDT)–
Reading Damasio’s “Looking for
Spinoza” (about feeling and emotion),
I saw Emily Eakin’s review in NYT for Saturday, April 19 (p. A15) and was
much taken with the contrast of Spinoza’s “I feel, therefore I
am” (not exactly in those words, maybe, but in his Ethics)
with Decarte’s mind/body error and the terrible consequences that have
followed from it.
- A reference signal can be set to a value
much different from its current
setting.
Th[is] one is the new one to me. If one suddenly sets a high
reference
signal for something, I would take that to mean that something is
being
actively sought, some experience one wants more of. This creates a
sudden
error signal not because something has disturbed a perception but
because
the reference signal has suddenly changed. The error signal is
self-generated. The positive direction of change implies that the
emotion
would be felt not only as self-generated, but as joyful or at least
positive. So here is a plausible way of fitting at least some
positive
emotions into this picture.
Can also be ‘butterflies’, nervousness, alarm at perceived risk, or the
like. Example: Changing the reference for speaking before a crowd results
in error of this sort. (A lot of people can identify this in their
experience.) Note that the associated emotion could be attributed to the
crowd, so the fact that the error is self-generated does not necessarily
result in the emotion feeling self-generated.
But these feelings could be due to internal conflict. A system that sets
the reference for making a speech. The person controls making the speech
in imagination. Some of the perceptions that are controlled in
imagination as part of “making a speech” are also controlled by
other systems. For example, to make a speech you must be visible and
audible. Other systems might control to avoid having lots of people
looking at you and listening to you at once.
But there is also the emotion that results
from setting a reference signal
to lower the amount of an experience, to move the experience toward
the
zero or negative end of the scale. This, too, would feel
self-generated
since the error that immediately results is caused by the change of
reference signal, not by a disturbance of a perception.
Setting the reference for making a speech from high preference to
avoidance could result in a feeling of relief.
Controlling a perception often has ramifying consequences for the control
of other perceptions. Changing one reference results in changes in
control actions (including of course the direction of attention) which
can create disturbances to control of other perceptions. These unintended
side effects can result in internal conflict between these systems. If I
am correct in my guess that this occurs almost all cases of sudden change
of reference, then these conflicts are another basis for feelings to come
to awareness.
What I think is happening when a feeling comes to awareness goes more or
less along these lines:
a. Sensations in the body address memories of situations in which those
sensations were felt in the past.
b. These body sensations plus other signals thus evoked out of
associative memory enter input functions of many control systems.
c. At some threshold of input, perhaps some systems with complex input
functions that are controlling these signals also begin controlling the
‘missing’ signals in imagination. This speculation (which subjectively
feels right to me) might require some elaboration of mechanisms for
imagination, I don’t know.
d. Or there might be particular sensitivity to those inputs that are
missing, or an active seeking them out.
e. Eventually, some control systems receive sufficient input to
‘recognize’ some perception that might be verbalized as a generalization
about experience: such and such is happening again. The evocation of this
generalization from memory by associative addressing is one form of what
we colloquially mean by ‘imagination’.
For example – and although I hesitate to bring in the much belabored and
easily abused term ‘story’ – there does seem often to be one or more
processes controlling for something like a coherent story in one’s
experiences: a context maintained through time whether or not all of it
is perceptible at all times in the interval that it spans, sequences that
‘make sense’ in that context, a consistent role for oneself and others
befitting self image and opinion of those others, and so on. Some of the
records of quick rationalization why one did thus and so, when in
fact it was a posthypnotic suggestion, are instructive here: filling in
the missing pieces of a complex perception with memory and
imagination.
f. Among the systems controlling the perceptions {a-c, e} are those which
affect body states in various ways - endocrine secretions, muscle
tensions, activity of the digestive system, or ceasing thereof, etc.
These in turn are perceptible as body sensations like those of (a),
closing a loop of sorts that is capable of runaway feedback until these
sensations are strong enough that one becomes aware of them. For example,
the seeking of missing input signals postulated in (d) might come to
awareness as an alertness, seeking additional perceptual input; the
connection with adrenalin, etc. is obvious but not in the control
diagram.
g. As the sensations in the body come to awareness, aggregates of them
are perceived as identifiable emotions and feelings.
Hating someone
probably feels like this. While the direction of intended effect is
different, it still has something in common with positive emotions,
since
it is self-generated.
The error perhaps is self-generated or not, but feelings are always
self-generated.
/Bruce
Nevin
···
At 04:39 PM 5/21/2003, Bill Powers wrote: