Dear Wilfried

Emotions " are complex psychophysiological characterized by sudden disruptions in affective balance of short duration , with consecutive repercussions on the integrity of conscience and on the functional activity of various organs .

Feelings are more stable and durable affective states , probably stemmed from related emotions you are chronologically earlier

The French neurologist Paul Broca , in 1878 , noted that there is a region just below the cortex , the medial surface of the mammalian brain , consisting of cores of gray cells ( neurons ) , which he called the limbic lobe ( from the Latin limbus : circle, ring ) , it forms a border around the brainstem . These structures , which later received the name of the limbic system , emerged with lower mammals . They coordinate behaviors necessary for survival , create and modulate functions that allow the animal to distinguish what pleases or displeases , besides developing affective functions , such as the tendency of females to care for their young , or those animals to develop ludic behaviors . Emotions and feelings , such as anger, fear , hate , joy , love , and sadness , are creations of mammals originated in the limbic system , which is also responsible for some aspects of personal identity and important functions related to memory

Dear Wilfried

Emotions " are complex psychophysiological characterized by sudden disruptions in affective balance of short duration , with consecutive repercussions on the integrity of conscience and on the functional activity of various organs .

Feelings are more stable and durable affective states , probably stemmed from related emotions you are chronologically earlier

The French neurologist Paul Broca , in 1878 , noted that there is a region just below the cortex , the medial surface of the mammalian brain , consisting of cores of gray cells ( neurons ) , which he called the limbic lobe ( from the Latin limbus : circle, ring ) , it forms a border around the brainstem . These structures , which later received the name of the limbic system , emerged with lower mammals . They coordinate behaviors necessary for survival , create and modulate functions that allow the animal to distinguish what pleases or displeases , besides developing affective functions , such as the tendency of females to care for their young , or those animals to develop ludic behaviors . Emotions and feelings , such as anger, fear , hate , joy , love , and sadness , are creations of mammals originated in the limbic system , which is also responsible for some aspects of personal identity and important functions related to memory

This question has been tackled by Nicholas Humphrey in a very elegant "History of the mind" (see http://www.humphrey.org.uk) where he proposes a phylogeny of organized life from bacteria to humans. And finds a permanent dualism of all sensations with parallel processing of "what it does to me" and "what it is". To go further, the question of "what it does to me" is both a sensation and the triggering of an action. Which is an original perspective on emotions, anchored in a dualism starting in unicellular organisms and illustrated by NH, as "seeing red", both a color discrimination and an overall activation.

To me, this simple and elegant approach added much more to my representations of emotions as the frequently cited - and more recently proposed - "somatic markers" principle, itself derived from W. James!

I do not know NH personally, but I have been impressed by his original perspective that provided a simple though subtile view on emotions.

I don't think it is remarkable that bodily sensations accompany strong emotions- emotional responses involve neurotransmitter and hormone release or inhibition, and these have physiological effects. Your entire nervous system is involved in the process of receiving and processing information and making decisions based on that information.

Have you ever had a "gut feeling?"

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/basics/gi_nervous.html

If we consider the evolution of human consciousness, it should be obvious that long before our distant ancestors were capable of logically assessing a situation and making a conscious decision, their responses to stimuli were guided by feelings and emotions- both innate and conditioned responses to things they sensed in the physical or social environment around them. Much simpler organisms rely on genetically programed innate (instinctive) responses and many such species appear incapable of learning (their behaviour can change over generations due to selective evolutionary pressures, but any individual organism doesn’t learn from its experiences). At the extreme end of this scale are unicellular organisms that move towards light or food that their sense organs detect, but away from other stimuli, with no processing of information at all. This is congruent with Françoise’s comments about a phylogeny of organized life from bacteria to humans.

The evolution of human consciousness did not replace these older neural or nervous systems and their knee-jerk responses to stimuli, rather new structures overlay but do not always (or perhaps even often) override the older structures. (There are many studies that imply the majority of decisions we make are made on a subconscious level, and that we make up consistent logical reasons for these emotive or intuitive responses after the fact).

There is a good discussion of the somatic marker hypothesis in the wiki article here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_markers_hypothesis#Working_mechanism

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The neurologist Antonio Damasio's book "Descartes Error" has been subjected to some criticisms but is in general a good discussion of the interrelationships between body, emotions and mind. Damasio explains the book's title by saying that, taken literally, "I think therefore I am" is exactly the opposite of what he believes. Rather, (both as individuals but also in terms of human evolution), first we are, then we feel, and then we think...

I just found someone's reading notes for "Descartes Error" posted online- these explain Damasio's writing better than I can;

http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers/notes/emotion/Damasio_2006-1994_Schnoebelen_reading_notes_5-23-11.pdf

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Hope this is interesting.

Paul.

Paul,

your answer is very interesting and I fully agree with you.

Paul,

can we suppose that feelings are the heritage of our ancestors which had no cognitive ability to react on sensual inputs? These feelings were an analyse of the environmental situation and therefore a motivation to react.

Now we have cognitive possibilities to reflect such situations but nevertheless the feelings are present and gives us "a second" interpretation.

Hi Wilfied,

I agree with your first two sentences, but would like to comment on

>

It is obvious that emotions and "feelings" heavily modulate our cognitive appraisal of the world, but I suspect that in most instances our feelings actually give us our FIRST interpretation of whatever stimuli we perceive.

Further, we each have the illusion that our perceptions are veridical, impartial and objective, but pre- or sub- conscious elements of mind don't just skew the way we assess information, these factors actually influence what our sense organs perceive in the first place.

One of the arguments of Damasio's "Descartes Error" is based on his observations of patients who have suffered damage to specific brain regions involved in emotion, who still perform excellently on all tests of cognitive ability but who begin to consistently make terrible life decisions.

Paul.

Paul,

yes, you are right! I agree.

In my work, I found that emotions depend on sensations. And also on images. However they add something extra and that is a state of being. There are other (higher) forms of experience. When we build an identity, we can choose what form of experience to give preference. Those who focus on emotions/feelings experience the body-mind dilemma--ie a conflict about where to focus. The bodily state is more basic and undeniable, but the mental state is more developmental. Other approaches to identity have different dilemmas. You can see the full picture in Ch.7 of Working with Values, which can be downloaded from my website at http://www.thee-online.com

G'day Warren

No disrespect intended, mate,

(I do know who you are, an' all)...

...But...

...is that an unsolicited advertorial for your on-line self-help business, or did we just pause for a message from our sponsors, or what?

Hi Paul,

If it was an unsolicited advertorial for a business, then I would have to be making money out of my website. But that download and everything I offer on thee-online.com is provided free and at my own cost--I don't even ask for donations. So I find it difficult to grasp the basis of your suggestion. I am trying to provide hard-won useful knowledge ... it's a complex model and I can give no guarantees it is correct. Can you please help me appreciate where you are coming from and how you are pushing mutual understanding forward? Many thanks.

I would like to comment first the answers proposed by Paul:

1) "It is obvious that emotions and "feelings" heavily modulate our cognitive appraisal of the world, but I suspect that in most instances our feelings actually give us our FIRST interpretation of whatever stimuli we perceive.

Further, we each have the illusion that our perceptions are veridical, impartial and objective, but pre- or sub- conscious elements of mind don't just skew the way we assess information, these factors actually influence what our sense organs perceive in the first place."

These statements reflect the common view that our perception is mainly affected by emotions, and consequently not veridical, or slightly less so. However, distortions are also a product of our anticipations, the continuous elaboration of hypotheses as to what will affect our senses while we are engaged in a particular action. This might bias our sensations, but it does also contribute to facilitate perception (see M. Bar papers) and common priming (outside the neurologist's test situation!) also mediates coherence or continuity during every day experience.

I suggest that emotion induces a bias based on how relevant the situation is for "me", but is not the unique source of biases or impaired capacity to be veridical. And of course, strong emotion might also affect the type of anticipatory hypotheses that mediate perception. As does the conviction to be right!

then address some comment to Wilfried

2) "can we suppose that feelings are the heritage of our ancestors which had no cognitive ability to react on sensual inputs?"

I understand this phrase as if cognitive abilities slowly developed to replace feelings, maybe I am wrong

I am somewhat uneasy with the idea of a dualism "emotion vs cognitive capacity". Sometimes the later is considered to be a "purely frontal capacity" ou "capacité exécutive" (in case it exists as such, but the reference to Damasio inclines to think in this way). In other contexts, cognition is applied to any strategy leading to episodic or semantic memory.

As I proposed in my previous comment, I find more interesting to consider the balance between, say, emotion and reason to be in itself as an indispensable tool. And to follow N. Humphrey with the concept of a double province of the senses, itself referred to Thomas Reid.

Thank you all for your interesting discussions.

Francoise,

your subtle distinctions are phantastic. You quotes also my favorite hypothesis about perceptions which "are also a product of our anticipations, the continuous elaboration of hypotheses".

Your question about the evolution of the mind-body-system is quite near my idea that in the evolutionary process the cognitive ability did not replace the feelings but the bondage between stimulus and respond was released (not cut). May be that our half brain is used to analyse cognitively the consequences for the individual in an environmental situation and the other half brain analyses its relation to the whole situation as a feeling. Both results have to be communicated inside the brain.

Wilfried,

We usually do tasks we are have done many times and which we have automated up to a certain point into a mode of operation. Where our attention has to be is also partly automated into mode of operation and we also monitor if we are being successfull or not and can depart from the automated mode to a more attention based mode. The importance of the goals being pursuited and our ability of achieving it are all reflected in the emotional state. Learning of new automated mode of operation is highly dependent on the emotional state. In high emotional state, the traces of the behavioral sequences are stored in mid-term memory for them to be available during dreaming for the integration of new automated mode of operation.

Louis,

I do not understand, why the "automated mode of operation" is correlated to the emotional state?

I remember a situation where I was driving by car to the city like a somnambulist because I "awake" near the Office where I drive every day. Only a part of the course is the same but there were no feelings or emotions. Obviously I had forgotten where to go in a slightly subconscious manner.

Learning to drive a bicycle is also not an emotional situation. Quite the opposite it is a very intense cognitive work. I agree learning depends on a relaxed situation and it will have better results if some positive feelings are present. Strong feelings/emotions will make any learning efforts disastrous. So I am a little clouded.

Wilfried,

When you are in a somnambulist mode regarding driving, there is not much emotions and you cannot remember or learn anything in such state. If you prepare for an important task, the most important aspect of this preparation is the emotional state. If you are truly motivated then your emotional state will remove all the secondary concerns out of your way and will provide you with an increased capacity to do what you need to do. In high school, just before an exam, I had a photographic memory. I could within half hour read two or three pages of formula and knew them instantly. That was possible only in that special emotional state.

Wilfried,

I agree with your response. Having been "forced" to propose sketches providing some meaning in this complex matter, while teaching pre grad students, I have elaborated the diapositive below, in french of course... It was simply meant to mediate representations suggesting how complex internal states may be characterized by changing cognitive processing of the ongoing situation, while affecting in the same time the organization of memory traces. Your automatic driving can be situated on this figure, even though it is MERELY a way to organize scientific thinking by providing some bearings.

Hi Warren,

Apologies- when I followed the link it looked like an ad for some self-help program.

No offence intended.

Paul.

Thank you, Paul. Others might make the same mistake. So I think I will alter the homepage look...make it plainer. I will keep the video and carousel, but just have simple text above and below on a grey background. Warren.

Wilfried,

Lets look at a particular emotion: sadness and more particularly at grief. When you learn that a person that you have a closed personal relation to die, you suddently feel sad, you feel a a kind of physical inconfort and this sadness will remove all your other concerned you had, will remove the motivation you had to do a lot of thing. During the period of grief, since your grief emotion prevent you from attending all the usual things you normally do, it kind of force you to dwell into this relationship , your life experience with that person, the meaning of all that. The important relationships of our life are not an external reality only, they are constitutive of our life and what our life is about. This dwelling into what has been this relationship participate into a process of profound restructuring of our psyche that is necessary in the wake of the new world into which the sad event has propulsed us. So we have grieving period in order to make certain changes within ourself, change that we cannot do if we are busy will all the normal aspects of life. Our grief forced us to focus on what we have to focus. All emotions have roles.

Hi Françoise, Excellent comments. Thank you. I like the graph. re our illusory "veridical" perception of reality;

Louis,

" All emotions have roles." - There is no doubt.

Wilfried, as to the role of emotion (and then, we might open a forum as what we mean by having a role or a function...)

First of all, as a physiologist, I would say that emotional responses assist somatic (and mental as well) adaptations in acting upon the body (autonomous as well as postural adaptations, mimics etc). Obvious role. And also, by providing the subject with a familiar set of response ("somatic markers") they reactivate past experiences promoting "the same adaptation strategy". Emotions have another dimension of relevance for the subject, such as the feeling (like, dislike, fight fly etc) that may become highly complex due to the private landscape thus reconstituted. This has of course a cognitive connexion...

This suggests that the old debate as to what causes an emotion (body reactions or central state) is a perfect example of a circular causality.

In this way, emotional responses are conservative whereas cognition opens to reconsideration, to new solutions.

This is also why behavior does not admit negation, merely habituation. My working hypothesis is that once an emotional adaptation has been memorized, it cannot only be made invalid by being replaced by another stronger one. Emotions cannot be forgotten, merely they are made more complex. Which is what one can observe in aged people (see my chapter on aging).

I suppose that my comments add on those of Louis but are not intended to replace them,

have a nice day,

Francoise

Françoise,

your diapositive is clear and simple. I like it.

Though not a psychologist at all, I suspect there is deep truth in Françoise's suggestion that emotions help to make some memories stick.

There always is a price in learning, as every musician can tell you, and in the end one finds a 'style' and this kind of reflects the intellectual or social or artistic niche one would like to inhabit. Or so I think.

And some emotions, or so it appears to me, help to think. There is a booklet on the psychology of mathematical discovery, with letters from famous scientists like Albert Einstein. He stated that for him, new ideas rarely started with words, much more like something muscular he said, implying a role for emotions in -his- mathematical intuition and, probably, in all 'assignment' of meaning.

There must be a song about it along these lines: whenever I think of her, my heart speaks out.

We dreamed the cognitive mind is the king, but now we see kognition is only a slave of the bodies interpretation of the world around. Only in the save and saturated situation the mind might be free ...

When I read a scientific paper in a field that I do not well understand, I know emotionally (this is not full proof compass) if what I am reading is relevant or not to my own inquiry. Sometime I read only a few page in the introduction and in the conclusion and I do not clearly understand but my emotional state will tell me if what I am reading is relevant. If I get this feeling then I spend more time in order to understand the book. I rarely waste time on an author which does not trigger my emotions in the right directions.

Louis, so do I.

When I try to play checkers, and I am terrible about it, I often feel the correct move. But it appears to me that when I also know why it is correct ... I just might win. Seems like a n=1 psychological experiment, that someone might like to repeat?

Dear Wilfried,

Your original question and reference to Damasio is a bit cryptic. You seem to assume that feelings are physiological reactions? Are you happy that they are, or asking?

I did not really get what Damasio was trying to say when I read his books but I have a sense he may be fundamentally wrong. Correct me if I am wrong but I think he suggests that the sense of fear is mediated by physiological changes such as tremor or sweating. I think this must be wrong because you can induce the tremor and sweating other ways (drugs, pain, excitement) without any fear. We come to associated fear with tremor etc but that is not the sense of fear itself. I think Damasio may want to find some 'physical' origin for a sensation of fear. But, as indicated above in the discussion this may be naive. In fact it may reveal a failure to understand what Descartes's cogito is all about. The cogito is a methodological lesson we need to learn before doing science relating to the fact that we can be sure experience is real but we should not assume that experience arises from a 'physical' world that it 'resembles' in any way. All we can really know about the outside world is the regularities in its dispositions to change our experiences.

As people have pointed out above, sensations are not signs of 'physical events' but signs the brain uses to indicate its inferences about dispositional patterns in the world of relevance to its well being. Redness is not in the world, it is a sign for a set of dispositions, of quite a wide range, of relevance to us. Redness on its own tends not to have a specific relevance - only in the context of shapes etc. So the red quale appears to us in a spatial frame. Dangerousness is not in the world either, but is a sign for a set of dispositions that do not need to have any special spatial features but have a very well defined relevance to well being. So the quale of fear does not appear to be in a place, except in the sense that fear is often clearly focused on some fearful, maybe red, object.

So I see emotions as inferences that are at a higher level than ones we put in a spatial 'qualia -frame' and for that reason they may seem 'thin' even if potent. But I cannot see that fear has anything to do with tremor - I have that now from my third coffee. Some emotions come with physiological reactions, some not. My sense of peace that comes from believing that my life in medicine was not entirely wasted in human terms does not seem to come with any reaction. No change of heartbeat, or breathing. Yet for me it is the most profound and welcome emotion I could have - far better than laughing at Groucho Marx until I spill my drink. Damasio's mistake seems to be a sort of naive physicalism that wants to give feelings a 'solid' grounding. That to me is pre-Descartes and even pre-Montaigne - sixteenth century!

Jonathan,

I agree with most of what you said about the emotions and their connection with what we care for, they are observer/doer centric reality attention pointers. I think that Damasio goes in the same direction (I am not certain of my interpretation, I have not read him only commentaries). Damasio claims that in order for the attention pointers to be felt, biological evolution has gradually feedback the care about long term goals into the already existing system of metabolism need feedback loop. Recent studies have shown that each of our emotions can be mapped to certain body locations. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57616422-76/gut-feelings-cold-feet-body-maps-show-where-emotions-go/

I am not convince by your description of your emotional reaction to your feeling of achievement as a doctor. This feeling of peace is certainly a physical feeling. Your heart beat is certainly not accelerating nor your breathing rate.

Seems to me a bit far-fetched to reinterprete everything 'cognitively'.

There is little doubt I think that both animals and men have physiological changes, often linked to perception, that we are mostly unaware of, and that traditionally have been labelled emotions. Or... perhaps Wilfred means something else than perception with 'sensations'?

I don't really follow what you are meaning here, Louis and Joris. Why would we want to feel attention pointers? Selection for attention is largely subpersonal. Why have a message 'you are now attending to this'? And metabolism feedback is mostly subpersonal, except where it happens to use a mechanism that is bound to be noticed - like shivering. Fear requires a concept of its own to be useful, so it should have signals of its own. It would be no good use the signals for 'too cold' or whatever because that would produce the wrong behaviour.

I am not denying that we get physiological changes with the various emotions but, as I thought Wilfried was asking, it is not clear that this is central to feeling - it is just whatever goes along with the feeling for pragmatic reasons or maybe cross talk with more primitive reflexes. It may be interesting but I am not sure what it has to do with the feelings or emotions per se.

I am not sure what you mean when you say my feeling of peace is a 'physical' feeling, Louis. As a biophysicist I have no idea what people mean by 'physical' most of the time. Descartes main objective in the Meditations was to point out that the ordinary man's meaning of physical has nothing to do with modern science. My feeling of peace might be associated with hints of thin qualia of absence of agitated movement but I think that is quite far fetched. I just feel content - contentment has no 'physical' content in the sense of causal dynamics. My sense of red goes with a sense of space but this is not 'physical' space in the sense of metric dynamic space, it is an idea of spaciouness that goes with an idea of redness.

I really have no idea at all of what 'cognitive' means Joris. Can you explain? And I am puzzled by the suggestion that physiological changes that we are not aware of might be traditionally called emotions. My understanding of the English meaning of emotion is that it is something we feel - are aware of. Like fear or love. Sure, we sometimes misread our own motives, as when we say something not out of rationality but jealousy. But I am not convinced this is being unaware of emotion. One is usually aware of annoyance at that time, just not aware of the subpersonal motivation behind the emotion of annoyance.

I may be getting Damasio wrong but I get the distinct impression that within the psychology world at least he has rewritten the English language without any justification - except that it provides an excuse for psychologists to write papers on a trendy new topic that cannot be refuted! And it avoids confronting the dichotomy of appearance and dynamics (not 'mental' and 'physical') that Parmenides had pointed out 2500 year ago and Descartes had to remind us of in 1641 and which is the bedrock of modern science. To think Descartes was in error is to my mind to be in the Dark Ages again.

Hi Jonathan,

I think if you show a picture of a snake to a monkey its heart beat goes up. And its behavior will change, it might look for a save hiding place. One would say, I think, that the monkey experiences an emotion called fear with some effects to its mental state and / or its cognition.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00753.x/abstract;jsessionid=B625469598A0FAEF8DDD6D20A1C33508.f02t02?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

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http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2009-07135-003

.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/emo/7/4/691/

.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/abn/98/4/448/

.

http://animalcogblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/the-monkey-and-the-snake/

.

Paul.

Sure, Joris, but if you show it a picture of a pretty lady monkey its heart beat goes up as it does with an isoprenaline aerosol. The physiological changes are neither specific to one emotion nor indeed to emotion. They are the lettuce leaf on the plate by the hamburger I would say. We use talk of these things to evoke a sense of emotion in romantic literature for stylistic reasons. It is more evocative to say 'her heart was in her mouth' than 'she was pleased to see him'. But evocation is by nature indirect - as in: 'When John woke the world was quiet - a quiet without even echoes - a quiet that could only mean one thing - that the valley floor was deep in snow.' The fact that fear and love qualia are not very well tied down to other qualia can make them hard to describe directly but that is not a reason for saying that al they are is a picture of you tummy gurgling or your heart flapping. The desolation that one feels when one's loved one has gone insane is something that can only be described as being like being alone on an island - but it isn't much like that - you have to be there to feel it. There is a quale that represents a complex inference about how the rest of life will be relevant to ones wellbeing, just as red represents relevant dispositions now.

I still don't know what cognition means!

If you do not deny emotions like fear or attraction then, in the context of this discussion, why do you need to know what cognition means?

Because, Joris, ***you keep using it*** and I would be interested to know what you mean by it. All I seem to know about the word is that, so I am told, at a major recent psychology conference it was agreed that nobody was sure what it meant after all. As a boring erstwhile immunologist interested in the biophysics of qualia, Leibniz and life in general I am keen to learn other people's perspectives - but I need to know what they mean by words to do that!

I am late to this discussion, but my observation is that felt emotions has no specific physicality. Rather, the emotion gives rise to an action or response that is a result of the specific stimulus. This action may be expressed differently depending on the past experience of the perceiver and the cultural acceptance of the response.

Hi Jonathan, In a recent discussion on ResearchGate I asked about the same question, someone said it had to do with mental models, and agreed with me that there is a problem here, that you would have to know what mental models are. Not as a technique for design as used in HCI for instance, but as a psychological phenomenon. But let us not redo about a hundred years of methodological discussions in psychology! Or... pretend that Descartes, who also proved that God exists because we think, solved such riddles!

Jonathan,

Here a side point on Parmenides.

Parmenides was the champion of the static world. Its reasoning is based on the idea that if we could know completely the world, this knowledge would have to be fixed otherwise it would not be ultimate knowledge. So he committed the mistake of equating reality with knowledge and so had to explain the changes in the world of our phenomenal experience as illusonary appearances as provided by the senses. He is the creator of the appareance vs reality duality. So the philosopher had to rely on their rational reason to directily access rational reality.

The champion of the dynamic reality was his predecessor: Heraclitus.

We all do not know what cognition is and we do not know the answers to all the other questions here in RG, but we can discuss about what we think it could be.

We should be careful to post definitions because they traps us with its formulation.

Achilles and the tortoise - the well known Zeno's paradoxes is a good example to illustrate the problem of definitions.

May be, we can feel what cognition could be but we do not know how it works. How could we be so foolhardy as to define this?

Wilfried,

Well... to not define also has a backdrop! And if you can 'feel what cognition could be' you already defined it as something much like a perception, and as something psychological, neurological perhaps, linked perhaps to the Ego and Will. Seems self-evident perhaps.... but is it?

Some inner mental states and processes must be assumed I think if you observe simple tasks, and learning them too. So I would look for a minimal definition, perhaps look for a minimal definition for every experiment, but define it anyhow.

Joris,

I agree. If we try to solve any problems we have a working definition of the problem and this definition marks the borders of our solution. We do not only struggle with the structure of our problem but also with some linguistic problems.

Some problems are so foggy we are not able to pronounce a hard definition but in a discussion the fog is lifting in some places.

Thank you Wilfried!

And perhaps I may also suggest something about your original question. In studies of perception, some speak about a perceptual buffer. For instance there is an auditory buffer and a visual buffer with rather different estimated latency times of about 100 mseconds. Phenomenologically, it appears as if giving attention to a sound that 'is in the buffer' helps limited cognitive resources to tune in to what may be important, and answer questions like 'is it the wind in the leaves, or is it a dangerous lion that hunts for me'. Sorry for being so Darwinistic this time.

Now consider fear, say you actually spotted a lion and would need to run for an hour to be save. It is not enough to experience arousal, like you spotted something. No you need to come home to your spouse and say 'goodness, I escaped from a lion, and felt such terrible fear'. So if some bodily sensations would be kind of specific for fear, and if some other bodily sensations would be specific for having some mathematical intuition, and so forth, the physiological changes might act as a kind of perceptual/emotional buffer, to sustain your motivation for, say, running fast.

Just ideas....

In the literature on Cognitive Dissonance (sorry Jonathan, and true, that is a somewhat more literary reading of Cognitive) some experiments were described that fit in rather well with this. People interpreted bodily sensations differently if they were manipulated by the experiment as to its meaning. For instance, they were getting the equivalent of strong coffee and were told it was harmless substance, and this influenced how annoyed they were by an actor acting impossibly impolite. Likewise I think that there is experimental work on how movement, even subliminal bowel movements, influence (sorry again) cognition.

Now you note that this does not really answer your question, because consciousness does not enter into it. But perhaps it is related?

Jonathan,

You asked: what is a physical entity?

I do not use the term physical entity only for the theoretical entities treated into the framework of physics. I use the term physical entity to any conceptual entity that can be empirically investigated. The different sciences have different theoretical entities which correspond to physical entities in the world that can be investigated empirically by their specific methods. Human beings correspond to different type of conceptual entities of the social science and the biological sciences. There is one reality of human being but each science study only a few aspects of this entity with their specific methods. They are multiple viewpoints on a single reality. I am not a reductionist in the epistemological sense of believing that is possible in principle to build all the conceptual frameworks of all science from the conceptual framework of physics. I believe in the genuine existence of non-reducting worlds of experience. For example, I do not believe that understanding all the laws of physics will one day allow to understand all the chemical world. I believe that some special chemical laws and chemical entities cannot be constructed using the physical laws and entities. I believe that the world of primitive life forms cannot be reduced to the world of chemistry. Some genuine new entities and type of interaction are created with the first actual entities of that primitive life world. And each new drastic shift in biological evolution genuitly creates new world with their laws and entities. This is my conception of a physical entity.

Hi Louis,

And add the social sciences, literature and art. Much can be gleaned about religion from comparative anthropology that seems difficult or very hard from a mere psychological point of view. I much liked Lewis 1966.

about word definitions...

I am very fond of definitions and I keep maintaining the "what where when" triple question when providing a definition. It is probably humbler, but in the same time the only way « neurosciences », this unlimited galaxy, might add some meaning by adding the prefix « neuro » to so many fields (economy, ethic, etc).

For a beginner student, emotion does not require any definition since everybody -hopefully- knows it from personal experience!!! This is the worst case.

Then come cognition or connaissance and intention. In my opinion, none of these concepts can be precisely exported outside the domaine in which they are used unless in a very abstract and specific (thus unsatisfying) manner...

As for our general question (thank you Wilfried), I think however, that the dualism pointed out by N. Humphrey between what « it" does to me (how relevant, dangerous, interesting) and what « it" is in the world outside maintains a clear membrane between say emotion and reason, whatever is meant by these terms. They refer to a border between subjectivity and objectivity.

thanks to all for interesting continuing discussion.

Wilfried,

Add dancing, rythm, musical melody, all forms of pattern and analogy. As when we kind of can not forget a song, while it is the words that apparently describe our current situation. I had this for a while on my bicycle, datdreaming about this girl, with Cocker's 'have been loving you, so long... ' Or when you have to cry when a well known poet dies, and 'an era dies'. Some emotional sensations perhaps, that were linked to those memories.

Dear Louis,

I think you are mistaking me for a straw man. I am not a reductionist. You will find in various places on these threads me saying that experience is the essence of everything. Physics for me is not about reducing anything to anything. It is about discovering the dynamic rules that link our experiences. And since I have good reason to believe that those experiences are themselves also dynamic, as viewed in the third person, experience is all there is.

And I think this idea of different sciences dealing with different things that cannot be bridged is long dead now. You seem to be about half a century out of date on the chemistry. There is no such thing as chemistry any more. It is all physics - either the physics of molecular orbitals and phonons or the condensed matter physics that used to be called physical chemistry. The gap between the two was eliminated with Bohr's explanation of valency. I quite agree that we deal with entities at different scales but, as Chomsky pointed out, there are serious pitfalls in thinking that a 'human being' or 'whole organism' has some special indivisible dynamic status that cannot be considered at smaller scale levels. As you say, we have multiple viewpoints of a single reality. We can only make legitimate use of the higher scale concepts if we have reason to believe that in principle the dynamics are reflected in lower level dynamics as defined by another speciality (if we have reason to think there are some - truly indivisible dynamic units are different). Anything else is humbug I fear.

It looks rather as if you take the nineteenth century vitalist view about life. And I have sympathy there because I also think that life brings with it completely new dynamic entities never existing before. There is a life force which is the internal force of new types of dynamic unit. But I see no reason to think that these are not covered by the field theory of condensed matter physics - why should we want them not to be covered by this? Because we want to keep some spooky ideas separate from 'physics', which after all is the study of causes of our experiences? It makes no sense to me. Physics is the spookiest thing of all if you want spooky.

On Parmenides Louis, yes Heraclitus is there too but Parmenides has a snappier description of the appearance/dynamics duality. I think he got them the wrong way around, as you may also think, but what matters is realising that experience and dynamics are incommensurable - which comes clearer with Descartes and Leibniz.

As to cognition - may be we should re-do 100 years of psychological jargon if it is rubbish jargon that, as I understand, has recently been agreed to have no consensus meaning. The fact that nobody on this thread is prepared to even hint at what cognition means seems enough for me to be justified in thinking nobody knows. I have been in science long enough to know that the great majority of people in it cling on to words without much idea what they mean and as a result the subject moves forward like a snail. In immunology this is very much the case. If people stopped to think what they meant when they repeated incantations of dogma in their lectures we would have sorted out all sorts of disease long ago. From what I have heard of psychology it is much worse! I am not a psychologist and this is an open forum for people of all disciplines. I think it is not unreasonable for me to politely ask if anyone has the faintest idea what they mean by cognition. Does it entail knowledge, and if so what is that? Does it entail experience at a personal level? If emotion is not cognition why not? Etc. Etc. In a multidisciplinary forum people cannot hide behind saying - oh we have different sorts of descriptions in OUR science, sorry you will not understand. Lets have some honest discussion!!!

I fear Jonathan, that we disagree on jargon as much as you disagree with Louis on how different subjects matters, different sferes perhaps, different publics, different here and nows, influence our talking, thinking and communicating. Even if there is no God, you still have people, belief, theology and even the psychology of belief. And where people try to agree on things, you often have some incrowd, some pecking order, and some jargon, in the sense that people quote each other without precise understanding.

Also in rhetorics, Cicero says you should investigate, document, present, and take account of the audience. Nothing old-fashioned about that. Nót knowing about psychology does not convince me that psychologists should take your questions very seriously. Some psychologists say that cognition is what helps to update mental models. But then, they do not have a very convincing definition of mental model in the first place, though of course many psychologists have heard about Johnson Lairds famous book on the subject. Though not a psychologist, I even read it, and liked it.

You see, it is what it is, and you can not know everyting. A sceptic philosopher proved this long ago, in the fouth century of our era I think. Knowledge can not be complete he said, because if it would, then you would also have to know that it is knowledge. And knowing this, you would also have to know that knowing this AND this knowledge that you already had, is knowledge indeed, and is true too. And so on. Brouwer used this type of argument when he founded intuitionism, some of it now much applied in Computer Science and elsewhere, Godel uses such reasoning in his Incompleteness Theorema, why on earth should psychologists be obliged to know 'what cognition really is'?

Skinner asked related questions on a general theory of learning: do we really need that, is what he asked, and with typical pragmatism! I think Louis agrees with me, he says that chemists have their own understanding of reality, and have good reasons for that too. Before you define something, ask yourself this question: do you really need that idea. Bertrand Russel was quoted in some introductory text on philosophy. Perhaps 'the final formula of the universe is some kind of Differential Eqation, but as yet we just have not got this formula, and perhaps we never will'.

Sorry to be so long winded, now I will try to grow some vegetables for a while.

And thanks to Wilfried, for voting me up again. What do you think about this question "Why have sensations physiological reactions like feelings?"

Françoise,

thank you for your sensitive answer. I agree, definitions are essential for science, especially neuroscience. Here are so many nebulous expressions, so I think the creation of a definition is a process and RG is part of that process. In all these valuable discussions some expressions become more clear and the way for a definition becomes lineally.

Thank you also for your triple question when providing definitions.

I find this most bizarre. Even Françcoise, who likes definitions, and Wilfried, give not a sentence to indicate what 'cognition' might mean. I am not asking what cognition really is, simply what people think they mean by the word. I would not get very far if a student asked what diabetes is and I said 'Ah, it is what it is, you will come to understand'. Sorry Joris, but your last post was complete Tosh, was it not? I might frame it. (Bishop's pawn to Queen 5.)

But I agree that it would be nice to get back to Wilfried's view about why sensations have physiological reactions (with reference I presume to the male Damasio) after digressions caused by people complaining about too much invocation of 'cognition'.

What is your view Wilfried?

Hi Jonathan,

Well, Peter Tosh was a reggae artist that I appreciate but you must mean 'tosh', or 'rubbish'. Frankly, no such tosh was intended, rather politeness and curiosity. Wonder what Wilfried thinks about all this, and if it answers his question on 'feelings', 'sensations', not necessarily cognitive studies at all. He is a psychologist, after all.

Now I do believe that a bit of tosh cán help thinking, like laughing or dancing or exercise. But... I did do something else in between than growing vegetables. Of course, they are supposed to grow all by themselves but here perhaps I meant to criticise myself for talking too much and found an ideomatic expression to say that.

Some years ago at least some specialists in diabetes taught that, although you always have problems with glucose metabolism, patients are fairly variable and that no consistent phenomenology of the disease had been published. Has it now been fully clarified? Many medical students are taught to pay close attention to real patients, because 'it is so hard to learn medicine from books alone'. Is that not true?

Consider that opinions on cognition also vary between psychologists, all kind of researchers and lay men alike, even vary between cultures.

I did not define cognition since it is as vast as all the traces left in one individual by the experience of living, processing information and searching for it.

Nevertheless, I have kept in mind from reading Tolman that a cognitive process is an operation on memory information that produces new solutions replacing a previous one such as taking a short cut or detour. And the history of animal experimentation is full of incomplete demonstrations that it can happen in rats.

I do feel uncomfortable. This is a perceptible physiological reaction, I would say it is a feeling. On the other side I realize some slightly aggressive sounds in the answers of this threat. So we have both, a feeling and also cognition.

The feeling might be produced unconscious by sensing the sound of text. The analyse of the expressions of the text leads logically to a cognitive produced result.

I would like to know, why you, Jonathan, asking like Sokrates more questions than the initial question?

Françoise,

If you say that "cognition is as vast as all the traces left in one individual by the experience of living..." I think you just might overstate it. There might be mechanisms that simply implement operant conditioning and not need 'information' as it is commonly understood.... or, in a particular experiment, you might only need careful observations of real behaviors to implement, say, table tennis by doves. They just might not have a representation of the rules of the game, and still consider it a variant of feeding them and/or of starting to fly.

But.... for some things, like to understand learning to enter Morse Code in a copy task, where increasingly long codes gradually become automated, and some more easily than others, it appears you do need some 'cognitive process'. The example is from Miller 1956 on the number seven, plus or minus two and I enounter this in my own research, as if codes with higher information value/codes with higher complexity are harder to automate. I have no hard proof of it.

According to common sense, you need some motivation to direct your attention to things, as if there is a price to be paid to be aware of your surroundings at all. And of course, there is a value in it, you just might survive when you are aware of snakes and so on, just might find a shortcut. So in a sense, as if Tolman (who I have never read) understates it, because motivation and orientation on ones surroundings must play a role, not just 'paying attention' to memory analogies, categories, or what not but also being aware of that red tiger.

To myself, this is Descartes main weakness. Not that cogito ergo sum might be turned around in different ways. But that awareness of the world at large, and of ones surroundings, is left out. What some Bouddhists would call the middle road, neither only thought, nor appearance only.

dear Joris,

thank you for your comment, which I share. However, as an experimentalist, I refer to specific research contexts. And a cognitive process mediates the finding of an adaptive response in a specific context.

my concern about "cognition" comes from its abusive use. Reason why I shall prefer the definition of cognitive processes. But, again there is always a drift in the use of such terms. To refer to my familiar domaine, spatial cognition is mostly ill defined. Even the term cognitive map is difficult to circumscribe. For some, it is to speculative to be applied to rats, because they consider that cognition implies reliance on declarative representation (still to be defined or to be restricted to verbal language). For others, spatial cognition includes any evidence that an animal can efficiently reach a relevant position. And the reference to a test is not better: latency in the Morris maze does not measure spatial memory. Not alone!

Hence, in this field at least, a consensus can only be found among some « aficionados" of spatial representations. Hence, the definition has a context dependent value, this time a social one. As most often when we rely on words, and this is not a reason to give up language, of course!

To Wilfried,

I suspect that you always refer to a declarative dimension of cognition :

" On the other side I realize some slightly aggressive sounds in the answers of this threat. So we have both, a feeling and also cognition. « 

My problem, if I follow you is that non verbal subjects (the deaf born people in the 19th Century) or animals in general have no cognitive processes or cognition in general...

Françoise,

our communication here in this threat is verbal and a deaf born human would be able to communicate with us without any difficulty. Even if you mention the early 19th century, they could write or communicate in other ways. Verbal language is not necessary for cognition therefore also animals are able in cognitive reasoning. I think consciousness is the keyword for cognition. Your definition is very well and if you wold add the word 'conscious' it would be perfect. If the result is not reached with conscious reflection I think the expression 'instinctive' would describe animal behaviour and even human behaviour as a reaction as result of feelings. What do you mean in this point?

Dear Wilfried,

I am only trying to be helpful. I have only asked one extra question and that was because I wanted to understand the comment from Joris, which seemed to be directed at my own comment and seemed interesting:

"Seems to me a bit far-fetched to reinterprete everything 'cognitively'. "

I wanted to know what Joris would put in the cognitive category and why that might leave out feelings or emotions. It may be that this is how cognitive is defined but from the question it would appear that 'interpreting cognitively' implies some conception of a type of process that might include emotion but only implausibly. It has become clear to me from reading on the net and the discussion here that there is wide variation in how people conceive of the category of 'cognitive', so I am interested to clarify that.

I agree that it would be of interest to concentrate of your original question. As I read it you are asking why when we receive certain felicitous or noxious sensory stimuli our bodies respond with vasomotor and other reactions, which we then also often feel. The simple answer to the increased heart rate of flight, fright and frolic would be to increase perfusion anticipating increased metabolic demand. But crying is obviously different. I guess watering of the eyes may provide a social signal to others. It might also be a functionless spin off from some autonomic discharge that also had an effect on memory reinforcement or some such. After all we sweat when we eat curry as a spin off from salivation it seems. But none of these explanations seems totally convincing.

What I would like to get clear in my mind is the relation between, for instance, crying, and sadness (or happiness) and whether proposals like that from Damasio are cogent. When I knew that my son was to be born and that he would die the same day, I felt no 'emotion'. I had known this would happen for some time. I was calm and resigned. But I found myself crying. To my mind, there was no 'emotion' or, in that sense 'feeling'. I worry that these words may have equivalents in other languages that have different implications. There is no doubt that someone crying can be said to be 'emotional' but I cannot see that crying is itself the emotion, only a sign of likely emotion that may in fact be absent. And I also cried at the end of South Pacific when Emile de Becque appeared at the window with Nellie playing with the children inside. But in that case I was very aware of my emotion - but one of empathic joy. So I can see, from my experience when my son was born, that the body may 'tell the rational mind that the subconscious mind has inferred that the world holds good or bad for it' without doing so through the channel I would call emotion. And perhaps for that reason I find it hard to believe that what I call emotion is mediated by these bodily sensations. I can see that some people might want to call these bodily sensation emotion, but that would not explain what I would call joy or sadness. Moreover, if emotions are considered to be unconscious or subpersonal that would seem to be yet another use of the term, that I find hard to relate to the ordinary persons usage, or indeed a useful psychological story.

Your question is fascinating and I still wonder how you would answer it?

And just to clarify Joris. Diabetes mellitus is defined as an inability to maintain blood glucose levels within the upper limit of the normal range as measured by the glucose tolerance test. This may be due to insulin lack (Type 1) or tissue insulin resistance (Type 2). It has not been defined by signs (as the presence of glucose by taste in the urine, of a non-renal origin) since long before we were born!

The term cognition has been used and is being used with different meanings. As long as someone defines what the meaning that he/she using this word then it is not necessary to convince the whole universe that his/her meaning is the real meaning of this word. This is a linguistic problem that is present with some many other words.

Humans evolved from primates and primates evolved from more primitive mammals which evolve .... from a primitive cellular life from .... which evolved from chemical soup .... which evolved .....

From the bacteria to man, life is a sense-acting umwelt loop, and the evolution of all these life forms (acting loop) into the umwelts they access and interacted is a world building process. The part of the organism directly supporting the sense-acting with umwelt into acting loop is what I call Cognition. Composite organisms such as an ant colonies, bee hive can also be described withing a global sense-acting unwelt at the colony level and so implement a collective form of cognition.

The primate - human evolutionary transition is a major transition and it is also a cognitive revolution both as personal cognition and as collective cognition. Colective cognition in mammals correspond to herd actions, collective form of actions. Dolphins are successfull mostly because their way of fishing is by being able to collectively create a fishing net, able to collectively attact potential predators, collectively do a lot of things that would be totally impossible by indidual to do. Lions acts as a pack, wolve act as a pack. The individual cognitive capacities of mammals is characterized by the learning from experience capacities. Since their experience is conditions by their participation in early age into the pack behavior, they learn from their culture, here culture defined as aspects of behavior that is not directly genetically transmitted/encoded/stabilized but learn from collective behavior. I will now skip the details and say that fundamental to mamalian learning is dreaming, emotion, play. So from the mammals emotion is central to cognition. And the primate - human transition is the splitting of the mamalian awareness into regular mammalian awareness and self-enact dream-like awareness. I skip the details, but the dream-like awareness, the self-enact narrative is the basis from mimetic enactment of this narrative. What humans have discover is the the theatrical basis of all action of the mammalian action landscape which are the worlds created by the earliest stage of the biological evolution.

Jonathan,

thanks für your frankness and the return to practicality. It is possible to ask questions to check the quality of the own opinion but if I would have answers, I would not ask such questions but each answer is an enrichment of my and hopefully all readers imagination.

The problem of this question is the attempt finding an answer with introspection. We find some answers but not simple one's because we are far from the origins where such mechanisms were 'invented'. Our emotions are influenced by our bodily state, the environmental situation (even the weather, the lighting conditions, a.s.o.), the social context and mental stats. So it is very difficult to find a simple answer. May be our concept of emotions and feelings is not adequate to the biological system. Therefore a definition is always a temporarily definition in an evolutionary process. The same problem occurs in the definition of cognition. In addition to all that linguistic problems by translation in other languages will take place.

I think we have a framework for feelings as well as for cognition. This framework is able to understand mechanisms in simple organisms. In this framework feelings are the perception of an subconscious activation of the body anticipating dangerous situations triggered by (unconscious) sensations. This is a kind of phylogenetical memory inherited from our far ancestors. Keywords are here 'body' and 'unconscious.'

The perception of such bodily reactions is conscious.

For cognition I like to cite Francoise: '... a cognitive process mediates the finding of an adaptive response in a specific context.' I would like to add the word 'conscious' and 'by using mental models'. This additions are a bit dodgy because they implies that animals are conscious. I do not doubt in that, but consciousness is a 'hard problem' and we have no tools to diagnose it certainly. Köhlers chimpanzees are able to solve problems with cognition and some other animals too, as we know yet. This definition implies no mechanism. I prefer some dynamic and hierarchical neuronal net activities.

Now I have put my cards on the table. The center of my original question is the relation of body, sensation and the perception of a feeling. Because of our biological history we have to accept that all mechanisms have to serve the survival. We do not descend from pre-hominid philosophers. Their body-brain-system was optimized to survive and therefore our conscious mind is bounded to the body by feelings which tend the mind. Philosophers may ignore pain and fear but I am sure, these would have no descendants in the dangerous environment of early days.

Dear Wilfired,

Thanks. I think I have already set out my view but I guess two points stand out for me.

Firstly, I am not sure what role the body has in all this. If a see a tiger in my kitchen what the sensory signals trigger is an activation of my brain (even the eye is brain tissue). In such situations I think I am terrified as soon as, if not before, I have a conscious visual image. What perceives this activation is presumably also my brain. At an early subpersonal level signals may go out to my hands to start them sweating, but as indicated above, I do not think that reliably correlates with fear, and it for fear to rely on feeling the sweating would be too slow. To me, just as our cortex constructs things like stripes out of complex inferences from the input, I presume it also constructs the sense of panic from inferences based on the input and what one knows about tigers etc. I do not see any advantage in invoking input channels from the body 'borrowed from previous purposes' since all our sensed qualia are constructed centrally following complex computational inference and are not in any way dependent on the origin of the pathway. A professional conductor can hear all of Beethoven's Fifth just by looking at the score. And I do not think fear represents a state of the body, but rather an inferred state of disposition of the world towards the body. But I am aware the body does send 'emotional' signals to the brain, although, as in my case, this in itself seems to be something that can be quite detached from the sense of feeling or emotion itself.

My other concern is with invoking adaptation. My understanding of evolution is that everything is acquired by random mutation. It looks as if it is an 'adaptation to' but this is a metaphor for the way the result looks like that because of selection. And every adaptation to x is a maladaptation to y (and an exaptation to z). A goshawk's beak seems to be an adaptation to eating pigeons and a heron's beak to fish, but what about ospreys, honey-buzzards and pelicans? And as you say, we philosophise and that is not an adaptation to anything. My suspicion is that evolutionary arguments are too wide open in their predictions to provide testable scientific theory - just as Freud's were. We need to know what is actually going on in the brain. The advantage of the Wallace-Darwin idea is that it allowed us to ditch telic arguments, which Descartes had said were never any use anyway, back in 1641!

We all have experience how music is touching us physically in making us dance and is touching us emotionnally. Why? A musical score is a rythmic narrative as well as an emotional narrative. Certain types of intervals make peoples sad, other type of intervals make people happy. Our sensory-motor system has to make our body move and it is essentially a mechanical system. There are naturall frequencies for all kind of movements. Very complex movements cannot be controled without a fine tuned coordination of all the natural rythms of that mechanical system. All this activation timing is probably structure hiearchically in the motor control system. The musical rythmic narrative are probably interpreted by this activation timing system and so are a kind of constraint on the type of body movement scenarios constraining a dancer. What is the connection with emotions? Emotions evolved first evolved for mammalian learning of new sensory-motor action modes in the episodic world. In very critical life situation the emotion system stores a sensory-motor activation trace which included a activation timing trace. These traces are process during dreaming for the creation of new acting mode from the sensory-motor activation trace which are used to self-enaction of the sensory-motor system. The new action modes being created contains some kind of musical scores , or motor activation timing structure, a rythmic narratives. These are also used for the sensing part in all the sensual mode. It is why removing the sound from a movie remove a lot of the sensory cues, and emotional information. So when we listen to music, we in fact entering a motion and emotional narrative that our sensory-motor system can understand and learn from it and the more we learn and the more agreable is the music. Mammals are motivated not by their immediate feeding needs but are motivated to act based onto an emotional system into which all king of long term episodic action system are the motivation. Emotional pleasure acts as immediate body pleasure acted in less evolved animals. Emotional pleasure guide us.

Dear Wilfried,

Here is a paper that I think will interest you. The umwelt section is particularly good.

Gestalts as ecological templates

Jan Koenderink

http://gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/oxford/Koenderink-Gestalts_as_ecological_templates.pdf

Visual Awareness

Jan Koenderink

http://www.gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/koenderink/Awareness.pdf

We are aware of only a tiny tiny fraction of what we could potentially be aware in any situation. While doing something, we can fixed our attention in many different ways and what is not attended is out of awareness. Most of what we do in done in zombie mode. Why aweness exist if most can be done in the zombie mode? When driving our car in zombie mode and thinking about this question, if a car is rapidly changing line in front of us and breaking, we stop thinking about consciousness and switch out of the driving zombie mode and become fully aware of the driving situation. Consciousness/awareness is necessary only when the zombie mode is not sufficient for handling the current situation. But if I were an professional racing car driver I would remain in the zombie driving mode and continue thinking about consciousness.

Hi Louis,

Right. So if you was a dog, and someone presented you with rotten flesh, you would feel disgust, and specific muscles around your mouth would contract, and your stomach would also contract. Sensible thing to do, as far as Mother Nature is concerned. As was remarked, along with much more on the subject, by ....... Charles Darwin himself!

Louis,

thank you for the link. I'll love to read it, but I just have a lot of work.

Wilfried,

in section 3 of

http://gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/oxford/Koenderink-Gestalts_as_ecological_templates.pdf:

''Schrödinger proposed that awareness is generated when the organism learns (Schrödinger 1958). All learning is necessarily by mistake, that is, through the falsification of expectations through actual experience. This is an idea that finds wide acceptance in biology, psychology, and philosophy. But Schrödinger gives it a novel twist: you “meet the world” when your expectation is suddenly exposed as

wrong, thereby initiating a spark of enlightenment so to speak. Awareness can be understood as a series of such micro-enlightenments.''

It is closed to your suspicion that consciousness is related to anticipation. Here it is related to the failure of anticipation.

Regards,

Hi Louis,

The most significant difference between you and the race car driver is practice- or experience.

The only reason you are capable of driving without conscious thought is because you spent some weeks or months driving during which you had to be consciously aware of what you were doing all the time, in order to condition the contact reflexes and autonomic processing necessary to drive without conscious thought...

Without awareness you would not be able to learn new skills and internalize them in this way.

Paul.

I think awareness and consciousness are not just for learning skills but also because some perceptions -such as the presence of a predator- must lead to behavior like fight it or flee it - or fool it perhaps. Such choices need cognitive resources and this need must be motivated by, among others, physiological reactions that may be interpreted as fear and so on.

Paul,

I totally agree Paul.

Joris,

It is not just for learning skills. It is both for learning skills or new mode of automated actions and for supplying the automated mode of action with complementary modes when the situation is getting out of control.

When a mammal enter a new situation where a predator appear, it enters into an highly emotional action trigger mode where a much higher number perceptual cues are subconsciously processed for the recovery of a small set of most appropriated mode of action which then guide the attention and the actions into the evolving situation. These are high learning situations. During these situations, sensory-motor traces are temporarily formed which are using during dreaming for the formation of new action mode and their associated trigger mode.

Hi Louis,

I am glad I do not have to explain either what is a 'highly emotional action trigger mode' or what y o u mean with 'subconsciously process'.

To me life is much simpler. You get consciousness when you need cognitive resources, to do tasks like memory, decision making, pattern recognition, day-dreaming, intuition, modelling, and even learning.

Joris,

Life is simple because we do not have to understand how we do what we do in order to do what we do. We are lucky that we do most of thing unconsciously because we do so many things in paralllel that having to keep track consciously of all of that woukd be a nightmare. An unconscious process is a process which is unconscious. When I talk, I am conscious of some aspects of this process but I am not conscious of all the process that allow me to talk such as all the movements of my tongue,

You do visual pattern recognition in many situations where you are totally unconscious of it. I do agree with you that you cannot remember,take decisio, day-dreaming,modelling unconciously. None of these tasks can be done by other mammals. Which mean that all these tasks rely onto a cognitive novelty that evolved with humans. I have my own ideas on that. What is yours? It is simple to say what you do. The question is how to you do it?

Sorry Louis, but I feel not obliged to explain why, to me, cats do have their share of day-dreaming. And more. You ask more than you answer!

Joris,

I do not know why but you seem to make the discussion personal. I have my opinions and you have yours. The fact that I tried to justify mine does not imply that I want to hammer them into you. I cannot answer your question given that you take my answer as attact against you making an open dissussion difficult.

Ok

Are feelings a signal to consciousness telling us the MEANING of a present situation?

What do you think about that?

Thanks for answering.

Happy New Year

to all who have contributed their valuable posts and to all who will do this soon.

Dear all,

Merry Christmas to you and a happy new year.

Dear all,

Merry Christmas to you and a happy new year.

I am sorry if I repeat myself: emotion is the meaning "for me" of a sensation, i.e. the "what it does to me". And it is a primary function, together as it can be a reflex response (nociception, as an essential response). whereas sensation allows to the inference of "what is the origin (called commonly a cause) of a stimulation.

To me, this dualism is a fundamentalproperty of living structures from bacterias to so-called superior humans. Interestingly this suppose that function is a sort of finalism in itself.

Best wishes to cross the border to next year.

Françoise

Francoise, I agree with your assumption of emotions. They are indicators of the relation of the environmental state and its meaning for tho owner of the emotion.

I would make a distinction in the sense of the relation. If the meaning or relation is essential for me I have emotions and if the relation is weak there are "only" feelings".

Wilfried,

I agree with this semiquantitative assessment emotion vs feeling. My problem is that emotion and feeling are words... And if one can discriminate between to brain structures... it is more difficult with words as they are defined from how we use them...

If I injured the index finger of my right hand.  As soon as I tried to use my right hand in a normal way to grasp an object I feel pain in my index.  Since we normally move our hand in automated way since the time we learned to use it in our childhood, this automated way does not go away as a consequence of my injury.  Pain allow me to get conscious of the index again and so to temporarily learn new action schemata that are minizing pain in the index, new automated mode of using my right hand that do not further injure my index.  So pain is used to guide to handling learning.  Feeling in general are guiding for  all kind of learning. They usually disapear in the automated modes that have been learned and only re-appear when these fail and that extra fine tune learning is necessary. 

Louis,

pain is not an emotion. Ir is an indicator of an injury and we try to minimize the pain in acting. That means we try to act at the border to pain but it is not a kind of learning because we will act normally if the pain disappears and the injury has healed.

Françoise,

I am familiar with the emotion theory of Plutchik, Ekman, Friesen, a.s.o. 

Dear Wifried,

Even animals as evolutionary old as fish experience pain and we understand why it is necessary for their own protection.  All land animal had for the self protection of their fragile articulation need to feel pain.  Pain operate in the fraction of second time scale where action is taking place. More evolve animals with bigger cortex have complex behavior, can engage an action pattern that take a long time to unfold and need decision mechanism to evaluate if such action pattern should be engaged or not and so judge about a far away future expection.  I sudgest that part of the pain mechanism has been re-used but this time it is for guiding the action mechanism providing feble pain guiding or modulating the action mechanism based on the specificities of the situations as it is sensed.  So biology do not have to totally re-invent a new guiding system for providing a feedback,  So the more dangerous is the situation being evaluated and the more pain in the form of fear it provides.  Different alternative action pattern can thus be evaluate and their different of fear may trigger a change of action pattern.  But the same principle  guiding behavior as described for hand handling can applied for behavior with feeling which are provided by a re-used of the lower level pain system. Fear is a pain now corresponding to an expectation in the future if a certain course of action is engaged.  Feeling devloped with cortex, cortex is organ of  the future expectation of course of action. If one of your family dye you immediatly experience painfull grief because your future has suddently change, a lot you wanted to do is impossible now and this grieve help us change all these expectation that cannot be expected anymore. I am not well versed in the litterature and so this is just my personal understanding.

Louis,

I understand your last post and I agree with its sense. The only small problem is the use of specific terms. The psychological terms are used slightly different.

"Fear is a pain" - yes in a special sense but fear is an emotion and pain is pain which results out of a injury of the body. Emotions never results arise from lesions.

Wilfried,

It was'nt clear but I tried to explain that the emotion system re-used the pain system.  The pain system takes its input directly from organ that are sensitive and make you feel pain at certain location of the body when these locations are threatens and this is used in the reflex system and in the short term motor control.  The feeling/emotion system is taking its input from the senses to monitor the surrounding of the body and used this information into the action control system where a large varities of mode of action exist.  When you engage into a mode of action and your senses get environmental information built-in assesment of future expectation are feed forward to the pain system.  Fear will be felt at some location of the body not as pain of that location but as an gauging of the danger of a particular course of action in that specific situation.  Making this information conscious and experience as a kind of pain and it is used to guide to choice of course of action in the now in function of pain/feeling related to the danger or chance of success of each.  Look at at the attached body map of where the feeling are felt.  This justified the traditional association of love with the heart.