[Martin Taylor
[Joh Orengo 29.04.18 2:36 EEST]
... My question is, can PCT be extended, or what have you, to
address these issues surrounding emotion that you and others
have brought up?
Probably. Here’s my own take on it.
This is highly speculative, but as Chapter 17 of Powers (2005)
shows, he was not averse to speculating on his own account.
Incidentally, Powers states that he wanted this chapter to be in the
1973 edition, but his editor insisted on its removal.
"* Not too sharply, I am afraid, but most tantalizingly, a picture
begins to form of a second hierarchy of control that splits off
from the behavioral control systems at about order two or three;
this other branch is concerned with the sensing and control of
quantities derived from sensors and from chemical messengers
throughout the body. … the effect is to produce patterns of
feeling states that arise as the biochemical balances in the body
change in response to the commands.* * [And just before the start of the above] “The whole system is
utterly fascinating, a multileveled system that begins in the
brain and continues down – who knows how far? Perhaps the
first-order systems in the biochemical chain are inside the cells
themselves, throughout the body.”*
               Powers (2005) p258-9
I might add to the end of the second passage "as well as in the
microbiome, the ecologies of micro-organisms that outnumber our
cells by an order of magnitude and that produce and use a flood of
chemicals in which our cells are bathed."
In the last few years much research has shown how the microbiome may
greatly influence our mental well-being in many ways (e.g., Deans
2016, Flowers and Ellingrod 2015, Kaplan Rucklidge and Rolijn, 2015,
Sharon et al. 2016), up to the level of mental disorders such as
autism (e.g. Kang et al. 2103, Mulle Sharpe and Cubells 2013, Vuoung
and Hsiao 2017), schizophrenia (Dickerson, Severance and Yolken
2017, Kanji et al. 2018, Castro-Nallar et al. 2015), depression and
bipolar disorder (Dickerson, Severance and Yolken 2017), and perhaps
Alzheimer’s (Kohler et al. 2016, Shoemark and Allen, 2015). These
mental “disorders� are distressing, but to conduct a PCT analysis of
them is far beyond my competence. Nevertheless, I can follow Powers
in suggesting a possible place for emotion in PCT. [I’m not
including the references themselves here, but you can get them from
Google Scholar if you want to follow up. They aren’t PCT-related,
other than as evidence that the microbiome does affect emption and
mental well-being].
We might start with the fact that there exists a loop in the generic
sense between the neural system and the complicated system of
interacting hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitter and other
biochemicals. Synaptic activity releases neurotransmitters into the
surrounding medium, though most of it is usually resorbed. Glands
secrete and release their various biochemicals on neural command,
and the biochemical environment strongly influences how neurons act
and interact. So there is an interior biochemical environment for
neural output and input just as there is for physical output by way
of muscles to the environment outside the organism’s skin and input
from that exterior environment by way of sensors. We might consider
glands as the equivalent of muscles, and perhaps there are different
neural pathways that are specially sensitive to variations in
particular biochemicals that might act as sensors.
Biochemists already know of many homeostatic loops in many
organisms. A homeostatic loop is a negative feedback loop with N
stages. Each “stage” could be something like the concentration of a
particular biochemical, produced from the interactions of two other
biochemicals, one that is the previous stage of the loop and one
coming from outside the loop. The one from outside can act as a
reference signal, a disturbance signal, or both at the same time, a
reference for the preceding stage, a disturbance for the following
stage, and a mixture of both for intervening stages around the loop.
The biochemicals in the interior environment might, for example,
globally change the gains of control loops and the interconnection
strengths among them, whether the biochemicals are hormones released
to the bloodstream in the operations of synapses and glands or are
the waste products of bacterial communities. They might locally
affect the performance of specific types of control, given that
there are many different types of neurotransmitter. I will not
explore these possibilities, but will take a more global, functional
view. I think there is much PCT research to be done in this area,
but my suspicion is that in this, as in so much else, Powers had a
correct fundamental insight, even if it was too much for his editor
to accept in 1973.
Here's one suggestion: emotion and mental health problems need not
be associated with error in biochemical control systems, as Powers
had suggested. Emotions are conscious perceptions, and perceptions
are functions of states. Contentment or aesthetic pleasure is as
much an emotion as is anger or frustration. So I would suppose that
emotional perceptions are some function of the values of biochemical
concentrations at different places in the system, particularly of
different neurotransmitters in the neighbourhood of synapses (which
might affect loop gains and might also link emotions to
reorganization).
We have "dissociated" or "free-floating" emotions like chronic
depression or the mania of bipolar disorder, as opposed to
depression that is easily related to a state of the external
environment such as the death of a loved one or the excitement that
is easily related to a mental or physical chase. The biochemical
states may be the same whether or not an environmental associate is
evident, but when they are associated with describable external
states, they cease being “disorders” and become “normal responses to
environmental stimuli”. In PCT terms, the emotion becomes part of a
perception of some aspect of the sensed or imagined environment.
Both may well be the product of closely related processes. When the
environmental states produce error and the biochemical states
produce, say, the excitement of the chase, success in the chase
corrects the environmentally perceived error and changes the
effective reference values down the biochemical side of the control
structure to produce an emotional state we might call “happiness”,
which is then associated with the reduction of error in the neural
part of the loop. “Happiness” is often associated with solving
difficult problems, of which a chase is an example.
When we experience an emotional state that we don't want, we might
consciously ask ourselves whether there is an external environmental
reason for feeling that way, or whether it is a purely internal
error that needs correction (“planning in imagination”). Whether we
can do anything about it depends on whether our reorganization and
the current environment provide us with the means to change the
amount of internal error – to alter the biochemical environment so
that the associated non-conscious perception approaches its
reference value. Perhaps waiting for a transient effect to
dissipate, perhaps through biochemical processes, might be
sufficient. Since the nervous system works faster than the
biochemical loops as a rule, waiting might be a generic way of
avoiding introducing error into a system by too rapid action to fix
a problem that might fix itself.
If there does not seem to be an environmental reason for feeling an
emotion we don’t want to feel, and the error does not seem to be
dissipating by waiting, then we might ask whether some action on
internal variables by way of diet, exercise, or as a last resort,
drugs, might work. But it might also be reasonable to suggest that
since biochemical variables are assumed also to be “intrinsic
variables” with genetically influenced reference values, consciously
perceived emotions might also be an aspect of reorganization,
whether or not reorganization is itself a control process.
Martin