[FRIAM] Eternal questions

Tue Aug 24 14:01:09 EDT 2021

I suppose my problem is that I *do* think we can find "the sadness" inside the brain ... well, not inside the brain, exactly, but inside the *body* ... well, not *inside* the body but peri-body, localized *at* the body, but extending out into the body's context a bit.

Glen.  I pretty much agree with the highlighted part, assuming that reader will accept my HTML highlighting.  

I agree that your fear is an organization of your experience of your house which would be very hard  for us to experience without focusing on you and what you are doing.  

I think EricC, Bybee, and I handle this quite well in our analysis of the anecdote of “Joe and the Bear”,  beginning with pages 8-13 of our review of Laird’s book,  <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260060117_A_BEHAVIORIST_ACCOUNT_OF_EMOTIONS_AND_FEELINGS_MAKING_SENSE_OF_JAMES_D_LAIRD'S_FEELINGS_THE_PERCEPTION_OF_SELF> Feelings. Your fear is your perception that you grabbed a bat; the brain obviously mediates that fear, as it does everything.  There is nothing more inherently physiological in “fear” than there is in what we are doing right now, you and I, as we tickle our keyboards.  The brain divides out of the equation.  

N 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2021 12:54 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Eternal questions

I suppose my problem is that I *do* think we can find "the sadness" inside the brain ... well, not inside the brain, exactly, but inside the *body* ... well, not *inside* the body but peri-body, localized *at* the body, but extending out into the body's context a bit.

Just like with one's thumb, sadness comprises a dynamic mesh of interlinked feedback loops. And that dynamic mesh of feedback is *part* of a larger mesh of such loops. (Re: "putting it in a robot" - cf types of attention: soft, hard, self, etc.) Some of those loops *look at* the sadness cluster, register that cluster as "other" in some sense ... just like how I can imagine chopping off my thumb and tossing that object into the woods.

Because I do this all the time, it would blow my mind if others did not also do it. I particularly do it with fear. Wake up startled. Think maybe there's someone in the house. Grab the bat. As I'm walking up the stairs, I *reflect* on my registered, now objectified fear. And, in doing so, wiggle my way out of the grip of that fear and think more tactically about how to behave if there's a human-shaped shadow in the living room.

I do the same thing with pain, particularly my chronic back pain, but also with things like stubbed toes. It's fscking hilarious how much that hurts ... ridiculously over-emphasized pain for what has happened. To not step outside the pain and laugh out loud would be weird. It's just way too funny how much that hurts.

I welcome a lesson in how misguided I am, here.

On 8/24/21 8:36 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

> So.... This is JUST a question of whether we are having a casual 

> conversation or a technical one, right? Certainly, in a casual, 

> English-language conversation talk of "having" emotions is well 

> understood, and just fine, for example "Nick is /having /a fit, just 

> let him be." (I can't speak for other languages, but I assume there 

> are many others where that would be true.)

> 

> If we were, for some reason, having a technical conversation about how 

> the/Science of //Psychology/, should use technical language, then we /might /also come to all agree that isn't the best way to talk about it.

> 

> In any case, the risk with "have" is that it reifies whatever we are 

> talking about. To talk about someone /having /sadness, leads naturally --- linguistically naturally --- in English --- to thinking that sadness is /a thing/ that I could find if I looked hard enough. It is why people used to think (and many, many, still do) that if we just looked hard enough at someone's brain, we would find /the sadness/ inside there, somewhere. That is why it is dangerous in a technical conversation regarding psychology, because that implication is wrong-headed in a way that repeatedly leads large swaths of the field down deep rabbit holes that they can't seem to get out of.

> 

> On the one hand, I /have /a large ice mocha waiting for me in the fridge. On the other hand, this past summer I /had /a two-week long trip to California. One is a straightforward object, the other was an extended activity I engaged in. When the robot-designers assert that their robot "has" emotions, which do they mean? Honestly, I think they don't mean either one, it is a marketing tool, and not part of a conversation at all. As such, it does't really fit into the dichotomy above, and is trying to play one off of the other. They are using the terms "emotions and instincts" to mean something even less than whatever Tesla means when they say they have an autodrive that for sure still isn't good enough to autodrive.

> 

> What the robot-makers mean is simply to indicate that the robot will be a bit more responsive to certain things that other models on the market, and /hopefully /that's what most consumers understand it to mean. But not all will... at least some of the people being exposed to the marketing will take it to mean that emotion has been successfully put somewhere inside the robot. (The latter is a straightforward empirical claim, and if you think I'm wrong about that, you have way too much faith in how savvy 100% of people are.) As such, the marketing should be annoying to anti-dualist psychologists, who see it buttressing /at least some/ people's tendency to jump down that rabbit hole mentioned above.

> < <mailto:echarles at american.edu> mailto:echarles at american.edu>

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