Jaume, I would like to share that I continue to find your research fascinating and valuable. It helps me begin to see how perception (in our consciousness) is neither emissive nor receptive, but reflective. We are only able to see ourselves through vague reflections others have of us, or by the way we perceive others and other things – and your work continues to demonstrate that.
I really like that you mention Darwin’s definition of disgust – it relates so well to a human etymology of what knowledge actually used to mean (conveyance of response rather than conveyance of afferent stimuli alone – savoir/sapere/sentiency/satiety - savor). Why else would we require social referents to affirm our affective responses all the time? And how your team members link all these so well – cleanliness, fear of impurity, fear of contamination, and the use of ambivalent social stances to hopefully substantiate inner fears we seem to share but try so hard to hide.
If I may ask your opinion on a guess about how our cognition proceeds -- this tendency to differential reason suggests that concepts like “oneness” (or “loneliness”) imply there can be no “one thing” unless we have “two such things” with which to discover the meaning of an antecedent concept (which we cannot see until it is no longer an antecedent). Loneliness is not even “one” – it is a sort of sense of emptiness, or zero (because we cannot confirm the one). Detached emotions like disgust require that we assume difference defines what things are. Take for example a coin: is there such a concept of a face with an obverse side but no reverse side? If there is a front side, it can only be because there are two sides. Laterality and symmetry seem to require there be at least 2 stimuli to discern a single percept, even before we infer potential subdivision. And if there is just one – or by reason of our locus we can only access one – we must attain reciprocal confirmation of any first sensation before there is a “first sensation.” Meta-cognition and social cognition perhaps, are not subsequents at all as we have come to believe, but the predicates from which potential cognition of any kind may occur (including sensation, “feelings”, attributions of articulated sensibility, morality, and more). This basal oscillation yields not only sensation, but the urgency/motivation to “sense again” what briefly we felt we must have once felt. Affective couplings seem they cannot arise until or unless there is some “mirror” to alleviate constant doubt of previous sensation.
Our emergent path to cognition seems more about hiding fear than about knowing things with any certainty; our social estimations seem more about ancient primal fears of group survival than about disgust or actual cognitive failures in others. What do you think? Thank you in any case, for such an insightful suggestion about what our feelings might really mean when we call them "thoughts".
Article On the relationships between disgust and morality: a critical review
I'm puzzled by the question.
I think the facile answer to it is, no.
But why did you ask it? I read your amplification online, but I am no closer to understanding with the question really means
Some thoughts which I hope may applicable.
I do not think cognition is about fear so much as it is about awareness, within which all emotional measures from fear to joy can be conveniently contained. Despite technological advances, we still behave as relatively socially limited, niche-imprisoned, omnivorous scavengers, instinctively wary of omnipresent threats to our survival. We still have a long way to go towards evolving what I call species empathy in which we are able to use cognition to naturally embrace other humans without fears of threat and urges for greed in amassing resources to guarantee the survival of individuals and their separate small tribes and clans.
Thank you Zachary and Danna for your replies, and I apologize for so much lack of clarity (rereading I can see a better, briefer, summary would have been so much better). Danna, yes, thank you so much. Cognition seems to be about awareness, but if I may add, it is not an ambivalent predisposition to be aware, but an urgent one which elevates via influence but that lacks direction or explanation. Awareness of that awareness (which we call cognition) comes to us variously as hope or fear or something in between - urgency of some kind tugs away at us, not just maintenance of change/response adaptation toward survival I think. That was all I was trying to ask - what do you think? When I consider associations I have pertaining to meanings between things, they seem affective drives to remain coupled as associations and defer further urgency. Please feel free to correct/revise/enhance/clarify, and thanks again for your replies.
Is your post a response to a different thread? It seems to begin by referring to research by Jaume (and, for example, their mention of Darwin's definition of disgust). Could you please provide a link (or the relevant text) of the work you are responding to? Knowing the context could improve the clarity of your question.
EDIT: I just realized that you are responding to an article in Psicothema, linked at the end of your post. My fault I didn't notice it, you you don't make it clear in your post.
As it stands, I feel that your use of the word "cognition" is vague and not in line with my understanding of the term. If I am reading you correctly, you appear to be asking about the evolutionary origins of cognition with respect to its functions. Is this the gist of what you're wondering about?
Broadly defined, cognition is "the stuff that minds do", but in practice, researchers break it down into fairly specifically-defined concepts like attention, memory, decision-making, consciousness, etc. And these definitions very much differ from the way they are used colloquially or even in other fields: your references above to philosophical conceptions of unity and duality aren't really something that gets used in cognitive science as I have learnt it. The phenomenological approach used in the Psicothema article is very unusual in cognitive psychology. When I have seen it used, it is generally limited to showing that certain subjective experiences are correlated with certain objective measures (such as in the moral judgement literature the authors of the article review).
While in moral judgement research the specific aspect of cognition that is of interest is how the experience of disgust links to cognition, -in general- cognition does not necessarily link to phenomenology, and certainly not always to fear (or indeed to knowing things with certainty!). I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that the functions of working memory in learning serve to hide our fears, or that our visual-attentional system tries to construct a fully accurate representation of our surroundings.
In essence, I think you have made a category error. There is much more to cognition than your question assumes, and when we look at how cognition is defined and studied I think it becomes clear that the functions of cognition are potentially completely unrelated to hiding fear or knowing things with certainty. The ultimate function of -everything- we do, when you get down into the evolutionary nitty-gritty, is either to promote fitness or not interfere with it.
Thanks Robert – yes and yes. One, yes my response was pretty cloudy (in reducing lots of notes the connecting arguments got left out). And two, our definitions of labels do seem to subtend future reasoning with regard to the process we are trying to define. As you noted, if we don’t “think of cognition” in terms of that definition including the amygdala, then it won’t. And thank you for saying cognition is not really about “…indeed to knowing things with certainty!” because that is my definition of it – what is “cognition” if not cognizance of uncertainty and drive to overcome doubt? The drive to explain certainty elevates from uncertainty; but uncertainty is anxious, not pragmatic, and certainty is inattentive to doubt, not attentive to it. Goals without drive (urgency of some kind) do not often get done; reasons hide emotional doubts.
Jaume’s study suggested to me, that influence is inside of us, more than outside of us. Disgust is a cognitive label we have come to agree upon as the summary symbol for a collective anxiety against illness. But we have forgotten is was once fear of illness, and now attribute cognitive dimensions (rightness/wrongness) to substantiate our collective amnesia.
Whether we look at the development of cognition by way of individual human development or as a species, we began life – either way – without true cognitions at all; therefore I think, cognition is not preexistent, neither is affectation a rationally deferred process. It must be the other way. We started as infants or began as creatures in prehistory with only afference and efference (influence) as contending stimulus/response rates potentially impeding our survival – so we quarantined our side of the response rate (emotion, personally or socially) to survive, not because we are non-affective by nature, but because we are so affective it has become a tool of cognition.
As a species, we “decided” to inattend the rate of urgency most other creatures must attend, by encapsulating our urgencies into substantively-deferred summary labels (social emotions) and that became our advantage. Please think of urgency not as fear, but potential loss of opportunity or future fear of grief – this is still cognitive, too. By not attending incumbent urgencies outside our desire or control, we now find time to fashion our own, which we do feel control and possession of. Illness is the one “breach” in our wall of cognitive defenses; it lets us see how vulnerable we really are, and what we have done to hide that from ourselves.
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