Evolutionary Emotion

December 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

In the evolutionary history of humanity, consciousness is a comparatively late arrival, appearing as a faculty only in the relatively recent phase of the evolution of life. Stuart Hameroff puts this date variously at between 1 and 200 million years ago (1). This suggests that, for the majority of the time that beings have been on Earth, they have relied on non-conscious mental processes for survival.

The development of the non-conscious mind, a mind we are still most certainly in possession of, therefore preceded the emergence of those conscious mental processes which are capable of self-reflection and reporting. It is likely that much of what we do is shaped by these adaptively established mechanisms of non-conscious thought. It is also likely that the motivation for much of what we do, which we experience as ‘feelings’, derives from this pre-conscious phase in the development of (human) life.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/cambrian.html

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Proximity, Sense, and Knowledge

May 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

According to embodied theories of cognition the dominant strategy for the apprehension of abstract concepts is through the widespread and largely unconscious application of metaphor, such that we understand abstract concepts in terms of more concrete concepts.

(W)e tend to structure the less concrete and inherently vaguer concepts (like those for emotions) in terms of more concrete concepts, which are more clearly delineated in our experience. {Lakoff, 1981. p. 112}

Lakoff and Johnson go on to argue that three natural kinds of experience, of the body, of the physical environment, and of the culture, are the basic source domains upon which metaphors draw. All of these source domains are apprehensible directly through the senses.

The concrete sensorial experience that we have of the world is therefore used metaphorically in the formation of concepts. However, the type of information we receive through the various sensory channels, eyes, ears, the surface of the skin, is not equal, and the use we make of this different information depends upon the sensory mode through which it is mediated.

The sensation of seeing is very different to that of hearing, and differs again from that of touching. It is inevitable then, that knowledge understood through the use of metaphors which derive from these different sensory origins will tend to exhibit differences, and also that these differences will be consistent. All concepts which derive from sight-based metaphors should have features in common which distinguish them from concepts formed from touch-based metaphors. I will show here that these consistent differences reveal themselves in language, in gesture, and in their status within interpersonal discourse.

In order to examine the ontology of the metaphors that we use to form abstract concepts, we need to clearly identify the nature of the sensory mode from which they originate. This means reminding ourselves of some obvious facts about the nature of experience as it is mediated by sight as opposed to its mediation by touch for example. Events which stimulate the visual sense, i.e. things that we see, are obviously outside of our body, possibly even a considerable distance from our body, and therefore do not have a direct ‘impact’ on our wellbeing. Visualised objects are also usually also visible to other people, existing in interpersonal shared space, which means that objects apprehended visually are likely to have similar significance for all viewers (seeing a tiger is likely to cause anyone in visible range to run away).

Objects and events which are apprehended through the sense of touch, on the other hand (sic) do, by definition, have a direct impact on the body doing the touching, they are in extreme proximity to that body, and are likely to have a much greater significance for the person touched than for someone else who is not in contact with the object, (touching a flame causes a significantly different response than seeing one).

These completely embodied ontological differences suggests that there is a structured and organised variation in experience depending upon which sense is primarily used to access that experience. The difference in sensory mode maps onto corresponding differences in the proximity of the stimulus to the body, and to the degree to which an experience is shared amongst a number of experiencers. Vision identifies objects which are at a remove from the body, and which are accessible to a number of viewers. Touch identifies phenomena which are up-close and personal.

Given that, as noted above, we draw substantially on embodied experience to organise and structure our knowledge of those aspects of the world which are abstract through the use of conceptual metaphor it is likely that abstract concepts will also be organised according to the various sensory modes. Even a cursory inspection reveals that we do indeed find this distinction, with concepts which we regard as ‘objective’ being referred to using visual metaphor, thus placing them in a shared conceptual space where they appear similar to all (metaphorical) viewers, much as we might place a physical object on public display. Conversely, those entities we regard as ’subjective’ are often referred to using tactile metaphors. These subjective entities are held metaphorically against the body where they are ‘felt’, an individual experience with an acknowledged difference in impact for the ‘feeler’ than for the objective ‘viewer’. Held at such close proximity, tactile concepts are not separated and distanced from the body of the person, they are almost part of that subjectivity, part of the subject.

Visual knowledge contains within its logic the binary opposition of self and other, subject and object, observer and observed. Tactile knowledge elides this distinction into a point of contact in which the space between these supposed binaries is collapsed. Indeed, with some constructions of knowledge, the metaphorical sensory impression that the concept makes on the body penetrates beneath the level of the skin and into the interior, where it engages not only sensorially, but sensually and sexually. This approach to knowledge is found in the ecriture feminine of Cixous and others, the goal of which is to create a language with an interior “to get inside of,” a place of feminine jouissance.

In making art we are constantly traversing the space between the objective and the subjective; stepping back from it so that we might get an ‘overview’ of it, then embracing it and letting ourselves feel it and feel with it. It is both outside us and inside us and the language we use reflect this oscillation, this switching of sensory channels.

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Conscious Feelings as Cumulative Emotional Tags

June 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

You are standing outside a football stadium while a match is being played. Inside, 90,000 people are involved, to varying degrees, in the match. Some are paying close attention to the movement of the ball, others watch the match officials, some see the shifting patterns made by the positions of the players and are quick to spot an offside infringement. Some of the match-goers are not directly observing the game at all at this moment; maybe they are talking to the person standing next to them, or standing in line at the snack bar, or queuing for the toilet. Each of these people, let’s say, is making a small noise, a hunger-fuelled rumble of the stomach from the man at the snack bar, a sigh of relief when another reaches the front of the toilet queue, the low murmur of conversation as one fan talks to another about the game. Perhaps the most common sound though is that which accompanies the ebb and flow of the game itself. As the fortunes of one side or another rise and fall, so the gasp, cries, and whoops of the individual spectators also rise and fall, shifting in lockstep with the perceptions of the game. From you position outside of the ground, you do not have access to these individual responses; what you experience is a low background roar which for most of the time stays at a fairly low level, definitely audible when you pay attention to it, but easily forgotten just like any other monotone. Punctuating this background sound however, is an occasional wave of increased intense expression. Sometimes this upwelling of sound is joyous, washing over you like a warm current of bliss and elevating you, buoying you up. At other times the sound drops away for a moment in agonising anticipation, then returns in an outpouring of ooooooooooooooooooh of grief and disappointment.

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Forming Consciousness

June 21st, 2007 Fred McVittie

Creativity, at all of the levels at which it operates, is marked by a particular state of mind in which new formations of knowledge are allowed to seep into consciousness. In terms of artistic or inventive creativity this seepage is variously referred to as ‘insight’, ‘intuition’, ‘illumination’ etc, and has a set of emotional and experiential properties attached to it which are familiar to anyone who has ever had an idea. These feelings are of relief and excitement, of strength and connectedness, almost akin to the feeling of love and sexual arousal. Having an idea, particularly a really really good idea, raises the heart rate, raises goosebumps on the skin (particularly the scalp, as if one’s hair is about to stand on end), dilates the pupils of the eyes, changes the skin’s conductivity, and affects muscle tone right across the body. At the level of biochemistry, there is an adrenalin rush which readies the body for a response and a wave of neurotransmitters across parts of the brain. It is significant that the formation of this emotionally-charged knowledge precedes consciousness, and that its emergence corresponds to a particularly intense conscious state. In fact it may be more accurate to consider that this knowledge does not emerge, or seep, into consciousness at all, but rather that it is itself constitutive of consciousness.

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The Feeling of Being

July 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Sitting here in this room I am also, it appears, resident in this body which sits at the computer. It may be, of course, that I am not really resident here, but that is certainly the over-riding impression I have. I am awake, alive, and present, and these qualities show themselves to me through this embodiment and the senses that connect me to the world.

This feeling of Being might be called consciousness, or possibly individual consciousness. There may be other terms also, but consciousness will do for now.

To demonstrate that you are consciousness, take a fork and press the prongs into your skin. Apply sufficient pressure to cause some degree of pain, and maintain this pressure for several seconds, minutes, or hours. The fact that you are enduring a pain which you could, with minimal effort, remove, shows that you are a conscious being and are at that moment using human consciousness to monitor and modify behaviour which would otherwise be beyond your control.

Conversely, one can demonstrate consciousness by indulging in some activity which gives one great please: eating, drinking, fucking, masturbation, etc. and then ‘consciously’ arresting that activity. Again, the fact that you are discontinuing an activity which you could, with no effort, carry on with and this stopping is not a result of any external pressure, negative stimuli, or coercion, demonstrates that consciousness is operating in you, or on you.

In both these experiments, pain and pleasure, every fibre of your body is telling you to do one thing, stop the pain, continue the pleasure, apart from your consciousness. No other animal, no matter how smart, would be able to repeat this experiment, and even if given the most rigorous conditioning programme, no animal would accept prolonged pain as a stimulus for any kind of reward. In this sense, consciousness is partly defined, or possibly even created, through an ability to not do what comes naturally. We are the only creature that is able to perform this trick of temporarily denying the demands of our body. An animal can only be prevented from continuing with a pleasurably activity if there are immediately obvious and severe negative consequences associated with that continuing: fucking in the path of an oncoming vehicle perhaps.

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Feeling Feeling

July 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we feel a surface and sense its texture, running our hands over a plank of wood, the tweed of a jacket, a peach, what is it that we are really feeling? The individual nerve endings on our finger tips are not sensitive to these sensation, they can only register the fact of stimulation and the intensity of that stimuli, so when we say ‘this wood is rough’ we cannot be referring to the information provided simply by the nerve endings. Rather we must be reacting to the pattern of activation of large numbers of nerve endings, the rhythm at which these populations of nerves send their signals and the area over which these signals are distributed. To feel this pattern is a kind of ‘interpretation’ carried out by the close synchronisation of brain and central nervous system, certainly pre-conscious and resulting in the conscious perception of tactile texture.

This interpretative process underpinning the perception of a felt surface may serve as an analogy for the process of those other ‘feelings’ which take place in the mind: sorrow, happiness, pain, pleasure, etc. Antonio Damasio and Joseph Ledoux both make the distinction between ‘feelings’, the conscious sense accompanying and colouring thought with significance, and ‘emotions’, which they regard as the unconscious tagging of cognitive processes with positive or negative value. So, for example, if I were to put my hand on a hotplate, the non-conscious processes which formed the perception of that physical act would be given an emotional tag which was negative. My conscious experience of this negative tagging would be the undeniably negative feeling of pain.

This separation of emotion and feeling, in which feeling becomes the (self)conscious awareness of emotion, allows for an understanding of various aspects of human and non-human response. For example, when I put my hand on a hotplate, like everyone else I begin to move my hand away before I begin to experience the negative feeling of pain. This instinctive reaction results from the equally negative non-conscious emotions accompanying the processing of the sensory information before it reaches conscious awareness.

To return to the analogy between the physical feeling of touch sensation and the ‘feelings’ of being, the relationship between these two phenomena may be of a similar order. Obviously, at any one time we are receiving a vast amount of data through our senses; tastes, smells, sights, sounds, kinesthetic information, and tactile sensations. Each of these elements of data, as part of their processing, is presumably being tagged for its emotional value, and these values may vary: the feeling of the sun on my face is given a positive value, the sun in my eyes is given a negative, the faint roaring sound I hear is vaguely threatening and is awarded a negative, whilst the sight of my partner is a source of a positive. Unless I choose to focus on one of these sensations however, my consciousness does not have a singular positive or negative reaction. Instead I am experiencing the totality of these non-conscious emotions as a single, largely coherent unity which I would call a ‘feeling’, and this feeling, rather like the physical feeling of tweed or wood, is not a result of any one emotionally tagged sense but an interpretation of the activation pattern of those sensations. Or to use another metaphor, whilst our emotions all sound their individual notes, our feelings are the single chord produced by these voices.

It may be significant to note that whilst we tend to categorise feelings relatively simplistically, particularly regarding the more dramatic manifestations of response noted above: anger, joy, etc. it is likely that there are much more subtle variations and modulations of feeling than is expressed by these and similar terms. It is likely that in addition to the rough tweed of emotional feeling there is also the smooth silk; in addition to the crashing Wagnerian operas there is also the quiet murmur of the river and the wind in the grass.

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Moderation and Consciousness

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One understanding of enlightenment is the pursuit of a state of being in which individual consciousness is minimised and a ‘larger’ or more totalising consciousness is accepted. Individual consciousness involves a close identification with the personal thoughts, opinions, desires, attitudes, and feelings of the individuated self, and this usually involves the establishing of a distinction between these entities, which we consider ‘the self’, and the rest of experience which we might consider ‘non self’. This differentiation is the duality which many spiritual and religious tradition attempt to dissolve.

Those aspects of experience which tend to draw us toward individual consciousness are recognisable by the fact that they are value-laden, by which is meant that they have a positive or negative emotional component. When I put my hand on a hotplate for example, the experience gives me an unpleasant feeling which I will most likely try to minimise by moving my hand away as quickly as possible. I can make a conscious decision to leave my hand where it is and continue to feel the sensation, prolonging the pain, but the extent to which I do this, resisting the urge to move my hand, is also the extent to which I am identifying with my individual consciousness. Or more accurately, this experience would constitute my individual consciousness. Individual consciousness is not the pain, or the sensation of pain, but rather it is my identification with the pain and my resistance to the urgings of my body to move away from that pain.

We know from neurological experiments that in an episode like this, the order in which stimuli, response, feeling, and consciousness emerge is not intuitively obvious. One might imagine that the natural order of events would be that the sensation of heat on the hand caused certain neural activity in the brain, which then coalesced into a conscious experience of pain, followed by a quick decision to move the hand away from the source of pain, and lastly the action itself. In actuality the order of events is that the sensation of heat does cause stimulation of the nerve endings, which does cause neural activity, but this is followed immediately by a decision to move and the beginnings of the movement itself in the form of the ‘readiness potential’. At this crucial stage between the rising of the readiness potential and the carrying out of the action itself consciousness inserts itself as a sluice gate which allows for the possibility that the action be not carried out. We could choose at this point to override the urgings of the emotionally tagged cognitive processes preparing the arm to withdraw, and decide consciously to leave the hand where it is. It is only at this stage that there is an experience of pain, the consciousness of that pain, and its accompanying and following thoughts, feelings and attitudes. In other words, individual consciousness is not present in the action of the hand and the hotplate until after the responsive action had been prepared for and the possibility of not carrying out that action has arisen. It is, to paraphrase Damasio, the feeling of what may or may not happen. The possibility of this choice is the source of identification.

It might be assumed that prior to the moment at which consciousness became identified with this action and pain it had been identified with something else. Individual consciousness simply had another focus, another set of contents, although possibly less laden with emotional value and the urgency which accompanies it. If this is the case, then this consciousness would be constituted through the successive feelings of whatever has happened, arising in response to the hailing of emotionally tagged stimuli. Just as my momentary consciousness (of pain) is individuated as a response to the hotplate, allowing me the option to maintain that sensation, so my apparently continuous individual consciousness arises as a neverending succession of such individuations.

One conclusion we may draw from this is that, if one is trying to minimize individual consciousness in order to enter some kind of enlightened state, then one should avoid situations in which such decision-making must take place.

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Between Seeing and Touching

August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Visual objects are distant from us and are located in external space. Felt objects are so close to us as to barely have ‘location’ at all.

Different visual objects (or concepts imagined metaphorically as objects) occupy different spatial locations, and changes in these objects are conceived as changes in location. Different ‘feeling objects’ or simply ‘feelings’ are difficult to dimensionalise spatially and changes in feelings are not conceived as changes in location but as changes in intensity or some other property which is not spatial (colour, temperature, size, luminance etc).

Between feeling and seeing the senses of hearing and olfaction are nested with intermediate orders of spatial extension and specificity. When we hear a sound we can turn in that direction, or point at it with a fair degree of accuracy, but it is likely that there also be a large amount of fuzziness in our pointing. We may know intellectually that sound may be emitted from a point, but our hearing of that sound is more smudged. It is an entity which has blurred boundaries, which does not exist in a single region of space but seems to flow from a region. The main direction of that flowing is toward the listener and the sound fills the space between this loosely defined region over there (and here the listener makes a vague hand-waving gesture indicating the space outside of their body that is particularly full of the sound) and the sound in here (and here the same listener makes a very precise pointing gesture toward the inside of their skull). The sound out there falls away from its source in some event and loses whatever singular identity it ever had (if it ever had any identity at all) forming chords with all the other sounds of the world. With eyes closed I (and you) can hear these chords, and while I can separate them in space I usually don’t. If I separate them at all, and again I usually don’t, I separate them in time, with one chord following another in a neverending sequence of conscious being-in-sound. The spacetime of sound is not the empty, crystal clear space of objectifying vision, but the fullness and vibratory connectedness of a single piano string.

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Atheist Awe

August 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Who among us has stood on a beach beside a vast raging ocean and not been affected by the sheer power and majesty of the sight. Or scooping up a handful of sand grains, a tiny sample of an incomprehensibly large quantity, has not been at least a little devastated by the numbers involved. Look up and see the stars and then tell me how big you are. These are just some of the times and places when our experience takes us beyond our selves and puts us in a place where medium sized creatures like us can only stand gobsmacked before the ineffable. Most of us regard these moments as interesting but ultimately insignificant diversions, and have no cause to integrate such feelings into the fabric of ones life. Such experiences that we might call ’sublime’ and the feelings they engender that we might call ‘awe’ or describe as ‘oceanic’, when they are associated with religious practices are embedded into the lives of those practitioners in a way that they are not with the casual, recreational seeker of the sublime. All faiths stress the importance of these feelings as marking knowledge (or the path to knowledge) of the relationship with the divine and this articulated, integrated set of emotional and cognitive responses is firmly ensconced within the writing, cultural practices, and relations of believers. For the atheists among us this is potentially a huge loss. We are as capable of grand emotional intelligence as the most fervent fundamentalist, yet it is hard to find a place within the life of an unbeliever in which such experiences, and the feelings they engender, might function, or indeed what this function might be.

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Thinking and Feeling

August 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In ‘Descartes Error’ Antonio Damasio makes the point that the common separation we make between emotional ‘feelings’ and rational ‘thoughts’ does not stand up to close scrutiny. Damasio draws particularly on the case of railroad worker Henry Gage, who suffered severe damage to the brain in an explosion that blasted a six feet tamping iron through his head. The unfortunate Gage, whilst he did not suffer physically debilitating injury, was profoundly changed by the accident, and that change resulted from his ability to experience appropriate emotional responses. Although Gage was apparently able to use his full capacities for logical thought and reason, the damage to his emotional responses meant that the purpose or reason for such thought was absent or misplaced. Decisions which should have been easily made became impossible, and choices in which one option would be self-evidently the best were often made badly. The reason for this was that the emotional intelligence which gave the alternatives presented by such choices and decisions different felt values was missing. In the absence of the emotional weight which we normally feel is attached to the various possibilities offered by a choice of action, there is no guide to tell us which possibility is correct. After his accident, Henry Gage became a drifter and something of a delinquent. Being unable to plan his individual life or to function well in society he stumbled through the last of his days in a chaos of ill-judged and disengaged behaviour. The lack of a properly functioning set of emotions prevented his otherwise unimpaired brain from being rational.

An analogy to the unusual circumstances described above, this ability to use the felt sense of what happens, is routine in daily life and the consequences of its absence are easily imagined. When I accidentally put my hand on a hotplate the pain I receive is a highly effective cue to move my hand away and to ensure that I do not repeat the experience. The hard-wired intelligence of the body, in the form of the pain response, leads me to the rational act of moving my hand away from the source of that pain. If I were somehow unable to feel pain, this instinctively rational act of self-preservation would presumably still be a good idea but it is one that I would have to arrive at through a process of logical thought, weighing up the alternative possibilities to decide whether to move my now-smouldering hand from the source of heat. It may even be the case that, if I truly was devoid of any emotional relationship to the outcomes of any action, then even this weighing-up would not be possible. One outcome would not appear any more valuable than another: burning or not burning, surviving or not surviving: each possibility would be equally lacking in attractiveness or repulsion, and I would presumably have no reason not to leave my charred limb where it was until someone with a better functioning brain came along.

This literal sense of feeling, grounded in the ‘primitive’ pleasure/pain responses of the body and central nervous system, may be only tangentially related to the type of ‘feelings’ we usually talk about when we think of emotional intelligence (although Ledoux and others make greater claims). ‘Feelings’, as a synonym for ‘emotions’ usually refers to complex mental states rather than the apparently simple knee-jerk cognition of pain and pleasure. The analogy, if that is indeed what it is, is nevertheless telling, as evidenced by the case of Henry Gage noted above. Lack of an emotional component to cognition, whether this be the simple CNS action of withdrawing from a source of pain or the complex and powerful emotional responses which accompany difficult, fully conscious decisions (think ‘Sophie’s Choice’), leads to an inability to make good rational choices, or indeed any choices at all. In this sense, all intelligent rational thought and action is dependent upon the emotional weight we distribute throughout the structure of those thoughts and actions.

One implication that emerges from these findings relates to the making of decisions or the thinking of thoughts with which we do not, or cannot, have any emotional relationship. This might include decisions which affect others but not ourselves or close friends or family, and ideological or political philosophical thought in which there is an apparent need for the development of rational ideas uncoloured by partisan feeling. However, these seemingly detached thought processes are usually drawn within the orbit of emotional access by the application of some version of the Golden Rule. We generally make decisions which affect others by ‘putting ourselves into their shoes’ and imagining what positive or negative effect a particular decision would have on their well-being. This identification supplies the necessary emotional weight which makes rational thought and action, even at a distance, possible. (This does depend, of course, on our willingness to carry out such identification. History is littered with atrocities resulting from ‘rational’ decisions in which the emotional responses of millions carried no weight whatsoever).

This interpersonal, ‘EQ by proxy’ method of effective thinking is a standard part of moral philosophy, although it may not be phrased in quite this way. This aspect of feeling and thought is outside the aims of this writing however and will not be developed here. A more interesting problem from my point of view is a consideration of how effective thought and action can take place when the contents of that thought are not human, or even human-scale. We routinely think about concepts which are either too large, too small, to brief or too extended in duration, or simply too abstract to merit what we usually think of as an emotional component. We confront highly technical and often counter-intuitive ideas and find ourselves working with these ideas and making decisions in their light, yet these ideas concern entities, forces, or principles which are way beyond human embodiment and scarcely within the reach of human comprehension. How do we think about the origin of the Universe? What ‘emotional intelligence’ informs the way we conceive of a Higgs Boson or a Charmed Quark? Or regarding a possibly more pressing abstraction, how do we make good choices about climate change or foreign policy?

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The Feeling of Light

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Although enlightenment cannot be reduced to the feelings associated with it, feelings which might include awe, a sense of connectedness, a dissolution of the ego etc, such feelings can be considered as pointers, indications that we are on the right road. Provided one stays aware that these feelings can be a distraction, and that the path to enlightenment continues beyond them, one should welcome them as encouraging landmarks.

Although it is sometimes thought that these sensations are unique, emerging only from spiritual practice and having nothing in common with the more routine feelings experienced in everyday life, this is not the case. It is better to consider the sensation of enlightenment as an amplification of the sensations associated with other experiences and cognitive activities. In particular, it can be regarded that there is a set of experiences which constitute an increasing intensity of feelings culminating in this sense of enlightened ‘unity of being’. A provisional list of these sensations would include: perception, ‘noticing’, recognition, pattern recognition, problem solving, ‘realisation’ and the feeling of ‘getting’ a joke or solving a riddle, the generation of a theory, and the various reaches of artistic creativity. It will be noted that this list, which is not meant to be exhaustive, includes states of mind which are completely unremarkable, and which we would not usually draw our attention. In including perception, it also includes processes of mind which we are unavailable to conscious scrutiny but which perhaps underpin or give content to that consciousness.

These processes have a number of features in common, and which determine them as conceptually connected (remembering that such conceptualisation inevitably involves the use of metaphor). Two shared features are particularly significant for our purposes: these are that all of them involve the bringing together of disparate elements into a unity, and the second is that this unity is conceived of as existing in a single, brightly-lit space. As we will see, these two features are necessarily connected but it may be useful to consider them independently.

Unity
The first feature they share is that of Unification. All of these concepts depend upon the bringing together of disparate elements into a larger unified whole, a singularity or gestalt which is apprehended in its entirety. The difference between the concepts is the extent to which this unification takes place.

enlightenment
creativity
theory (and mythologisation)
realisation
recognition
noticing
perception

The higher up the list one goes, the greater the degree of singularity one is attributing to experience, with the ultimate goal of enlightenment as one in which one experiences the universe, including oneself as a single undivided whole. At that level everything is brought together and there is no distinction between self and other, mind and body, conscious and unconscious; all is seamlessly unified into the singularity of One. Starting at the bottom however this bringing together of individual elements is much more routine. Perception involves the compilation of sense data, the information about the world provided by the senses, into manageable and meaningful phenomena. When we look at a tree for example, we do not observe the individual elements that make up the tree: the branches, bark, leaves, the sound of the wind rustling those leaves etc, and then consciously assemble this data into a unified whole. Rather, it is the whole tree which presents itself to consciousness, the assembly having taken place in the interstices of the brain using the normal processes of perception. This compilation of sensory impressions into complex gestalts is entirely automatic and non-conscious. In fact it is only by an effort of conscious will that we are able to prevent ourselves from performing this routine act of creative construction. If we wish to see the elements which make up the tree, or make up whatever other gestalt is presenting itself, then we have to consciously shift our attention to those elements. (Actually, it may be inaccurate to say that this perception is ‘presented’ to consciousness as if consciousness is a kind of empty stage waiting for the performance of the world. It might be more accurate to see such a ‘performance’ as constituting consciousness.)

It might be a subject of interest why the routine unification of sense-data seems to operate at particular scales. When we look out into the world why do our non-conscious unifying processes stop at the place they do? Why, when we look at a tree do we see a tree first rather than the leaves or the forest? It seems likely that, since cognition derives from the adaptive processes of evolution, then the unifying processes of perception would tend to converge on scales which best served that end. When one is looking for somewhere to hide from a predator there is clearly an adaptive advantage to be gained from seeing tree rather than leaves or forest. Or to bring the example indoors, why, when we look at a chair do we initially and effortlessly see a chair rather than a composite of rectangular shapes or a general piece of furniture? For that matter, why do we not see fragmented patterns of light and shade or particles of matter. Normal waking awareness is partly a process in which the disparate sense data of the world is brought together by non-conscious operations into appropriately-sized gestalts, this ‘appropriateness’ being determined by the affordances offered by these gestalts.

(It should be noted that the scale at which this unconscious unification happens is not only a product of evolutionary determinism but is also partly determined by cultural circumstances; different circumstances suggest different affordances from the environment. So, for example, whilst I might take a trip to the coast and see the ocean, a surfer might look in the same direction and see the wave.)

Perception of the kind I am indicating here is entirely unconscious and requires no effort of will and need produce no sense of awareness. To experience the unification of the sense data of the world at this level would be totally unremarkable. This is the kind of perception we have when we are ‘doing something else’. When we drive down the motorway singing along to the radio, or daydream while we walk the dog in the park, this unifying of perception is what stops us crashing into the armco or stepping off the path, or bumping our head on the low-lying branches of the trees.

On a neurological level, this process is referred to as ‘perceptual binding’ and involves the synchronised firing of networks of neurons. These networks code for different sense data: vertical lines, particular colours, edges, certain shapes etc. and the synchronisation unifies these individual data items into a coherent mental ‘image’ such that we do not see these data elements but only the results of their synchronisation, a chair for example.

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Langer on Feelings

September 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Feeling and Feeling

a work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and what it expresses is human feeling. The word “feeling” must be taken here in its broadest sense, meaning everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excitement and repose, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady feeling-tones of a conscious human life (Langer, 1947, p. 15).

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Knowledge, Substance, Proximity

September 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

We indicate different types and different status of knowledge using a range of metaphors. One of these is proximity, in which we indicate knowledge which we feel most sure about by conceiving of it as lying close to or in contact with the body, whilst more impersonal, and possibly contested knowledge tends to be conceptualised as remote.

A second gradient of different ways of knowing is that of the different sensory mode through which that knowledge is metaphorically conceived, with ‘felt’ knowledge, drawing on metaphors of touch, having a subjective quality, with the kind of personal certainty which accompanies ‘feelings’. Observed knowledge, using metaphors of sight, lies at the outer end of the spectrum and is seen (sic) as objective and existing apart from the individual body in intersubjective space. The certainties of objectivity are social and interpersonal and may not be ‘felt’ as certainties at all.

These two metaphor sets correlate with one another such that proximal knowledge, lying close to the body, is usually ‘felt’, whereas remote knowledge, separated from the body and located in objective space, is ’seen’. Felt knowing is subjective and seen knowledge is objective.

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buddhism emotion cognition

October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Buddhist Thought and Contemporary Science

Ayya Khema:

“In Pali, heart and mind are one word (citta), but in English we have to differentiate between the two to make the meaning clear.
When we attend to the mind, we are concerned with the thinking process and the intellectual understanding that derives from knowledge, and with our ability to retain knowledge and make use of it.
When we speak of “heart” we think of feelings and emotions, our ability to respond with our fundamental being.
Although we may believe that we are leading our lives according to our thinking process, that is not the case. If we examine this more closely, we will find that we are leading our lives according to our feelings and that our thinking is dependent upon our feelings. The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.”

There is a parallel here to Damasio, Ledoux, on role of emotion in cognition.

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The Substance of Knowledge

October 12th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One of the ways in which we conceptualise different types (or strengths) of knowing is through mapping apparent differences in forms of knowledge onto our embodied experience with different types (or strengths) of substance. In this, knowledge which is felt and which we conceive as proximal to the body is also conceptualised as solid. When we are describing this knowledge we may use terms like ‘hard’, ‘concrete’, ‘firm’, etc. words which indicate that it is close enough to us that we can touch and hold it, and assess its strength using the sense of touch. As knowledge becomes less closely held, and as it moves through other sensory modes, it loses this felt solidity and becomes, initially, more malleable or fluid, then it acquires something of the properties of a gas, or even of light, such that we might feel that we have only the most remote and barely tangible evidence of its existence, like the shadows cast by knowledge that we find in experimental data for example.

As this knowledge is disappearing from the radar of the senses, losing its ability to be described metaphorically by touch, then by smell, taste, sound, and finally by sight, its substantive quality becomes less and less available to sense until it slips away entirely, and even our most potent metaphors are incapable of containing it or bringing it home. At this point, when the object (sic) of our knowing is infinitely remote from us and is outside the range of all sensation, then we cannot conceive it as solid, liquid, or gas. If we give it substantial existence at all, which metaphorically we almost invariably do, we must conceive it as a substance which lies outside this material trinity in some fourth state of imaginary matter, a kind of ‘quadressence’: a possibly volatile ’spirit’.

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The Order of Fear

November 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we see something that scares us, and causes us to back away, intuition tells us that the order of events in this process is as follows;

1. The information from the world, say the light reflected off the tiger, enters our eyes
2. The information is processed by the visual centres of the brain, allowing us to consciously recognise the tiger
3. Because we know that tigers are dangerous we are consciously fearful
4. Also because of our knowledge of the dangers we decide to run away.

This order, whilst it seems logical, is inaccurate. A more likely chain of events is as follows;

1. The information from the world, say the light reflected off the tiger, enters our eyes, along with a lot of other information-bearing light
2. The pattern-seeking systems in the brain search the data for particularly salient features, particularly those offering opportunities and threats
3. The salience is dependent upon the affordances offered by the pattern, so this affordance is what is searched for. In the case of the tiger it would be the potential for causing physical harm.
4. A tiger-shaped pattern or ‘affordance structure’ is recognised.
5. The recognition of this affordance structure causes an immediate physical response pattern, that off running away.
6. Part of this response pattern is the release of chemicals into the body that facilitate prompt action.
7. After the action has already been triggered the conscious parts of the mind note the physical and biochemical changes and experience these changes as ‘fear’.
8. Alongside this feeling of fear there is conscious awareness and recognition of the tiger.
9. This conscious recognition allows us, if we choose, to block the action of running which has been initiated, if we wish to protect our loved ones for example.

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Darkness at Noon - Objectivity and Undeniability

November 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

A common metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge is that of ’seeing’. When we want to refer to such gaining of knowledge we might explicitly say ‘I see’, meaning that we have such an understanding. As noted elsewhere, this visual metaphor for knowing also confers object-like status on the knowledge itself and we intuitively begin to treat it as if it were some kind of object that can be ‘grasped’, ‘acquired’, and ‘transferred’, or might be ‘hard’, ‘robust’, or less positively ’slippery’.

The visual metaphor for knowing also has a number of significant entailments which figure within the structure of the metaphor but which may be less obvious. Firstly there is the requirement that these ‘objects’ of knowledge exist in some kind of conceptual ’space’, usually external to the body (obviously, or we would not be able to ’see’ them), and secondly that this space be illuminated. This latter point is evidenced in our references to being ‘in the dark’; we use this and similar phrases when we want to indicate that we know that certain facts (knowledge objects) are ‘out there’ but we cannot see them.

Some types of knowing are conceptualised without the use of the visual metaphor, and in these cases some other sensory mode is usually referred to. So for example, when we want to indicate that we understand what a person is saying but do not want to simply agree with their viewpoint (sic) we might say ‘I hear what you’re saying’. By using an auditory rather than a visual metaphor we have acknowledged the existence of the facts the other person is claiming sight of but have not awarded those facts the full objective status that would be implied by saying that we also ’saw’ what they meant. We are acknowledging the existence of their words, but holding back on accepting the truth claims that those words make. To this extent we might say that (metaphorical) seeing is believing, whilst (metaphorical) hearing has something of the status of rumour; a good indication of what the other person thinks they know, but no guarantee of authority.

Other metaphorical senses used as labels for knowing have similar partial status; ‘felt’ knowledge is usual personal and tacit, and the defining feature of that form of knowing we call ‘taste’ is that it is not ‘out there’ in interpersonal space at all but is inside the body, inside the mouth. Strangely, these up close and personal (or even internal, interoceptive) forms of knowing, whilst they may not have the interpersonal and social authority of ’seen’ facts often have a feeling of personal authority which exceeds the objective. Whilst we may rationally understand that ‘feelings aren’t facts’ as the AA mantra goes, at the same time there is an undeniability of this type of felt knowledge which is often lacking in the objective. Many of us will have had the sense that, whilst all the (objective) facts about a certain phenomenon say one thing, our guts say something else, and that ‘gut feeling’ has a authoritative quality which is hard to overcome.

Obviously these acts of knowing that draw on non-visual metaphors have different, and usually lower social status than the objective knowledge of the seen. In any official context, or in any claim for the authority mentioned above, it is visual, ‘objective’ knowledge which holds sway. For this reason it is not surprising that when we wish to imply that our ideas should be treated as authoritative we tend to use visual metaphors to frame those ideas. Any politician who argued that his opponents ideas were invalid because they were ‘not to his taste’ would get short shrift from those who argued that the truth of such ideas ‘could easily be seen’.

Occasionally the visual metaphor is used to articulate a belief about the status of knowledge which is not easily shared, or which has ambiguous status, and this is most clearly revealed in the language around enlightenment and spiritual experiences. Typically, a person experiencing some kind of epiphany or divine revelation would claim that this experience constitutes the gaining of knowledge or insight, usually a particularly significant or transformative insight which seems to have something to say about the external world. To this extent it requires an objective explanation. Also, such experiences tend to have a quality of undeniability about them; it is rare for a person having such an experience to doubt the reality of it, in the way one might doubt the reality of a contestable fact. To this extent such experiences also demand an explanatory form which indicates the felt certainty of that knowledge. For these reasons, any desire to communicate this experience and share the knowledge thus gained would require that this communication use sensory metaphors which convey the most authority, which as already noted tend to be visual metaphors with all the entailments of space and light that go along with them. (This paragraph has already mobilised some of these metaphors as exemplified in words like ‘enlightenment’ and ‘insight’). They would also require the use of metaphors which convey the ‘felt’ sense of the experience, with all of the self-evident undeniability of the closely-held belief, (again the idea of a belief being ‘closely held’ indicates the mobilisation of an appropriate metaphor, and the unavoidability of using such metaphors in writing and thinking about these concepts). The requirements of a form of expression and conceptualisation appropriate to these experiences inevitably lead to paradox; one must find a way of thinking and speaking which simultaneously evokes the metaphorically exterior space in which objects of knowledge gain their interpersonal authority, a space which is illuminated and translucent, but one must also suggest the darkness and contact of the internal space which give an undeniably sense of phenomenological truth. This necessary paradox may help to explain why some authors, when trying to articulate the enlightenment state (or cognate conditions) use apparently oxymoronic terms such as ‘the dazzling dark’, or possibly in the case of alien abduction, a strange set of (probably confabulated) experiences in which similar symptoms to enlightenment are featured, the light emitted by the aliens or the ships has been described as ‘white, but dark white’.

Posted in Belief, Darkness, Feeling, Grasp, Hearing, Knowledge, Light, Metaphor, Objectivity, Seeing, Sense, Space, Taste | No Comments »

Problem-finding and the Feeling of Meaning

December 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is some evidence to suggest that there is a universal human need to engage in cognitive behaviour which exceeds the demands of the immediate situation. Rather than simply being limited to responding to the ‘problems’ posed by the environment, humans also engage in active ‘problem finding’, (what Newberg and D’Aquili refer to as the ‘cognitive imperative’). This excessive cognition, which undoubtedly conferred adaptive advantages upon our ancestors, most likely underpins such human traits as; worrying about what might happen at some unspecified point in the future, finding fault with situations and the behaviours of others, and more positively, inventing solutions to potential problems before they arise, and all forms of creativity. The reach or ambition of this tendency does not seem be confined to the realm of potential opportunities and threats to the physical body or the immediate community, but extends to the construction of problems which have no direct impact on the material body at all. These include such worrisome conundrums as ‘why is there something rather than nothing?, ‘What happens after you die?’, and ‘Why is there evil in the world?’. The fact that these and related problems underpin most religious and philosophical practices, and the fact that such practices are found in all cultures throughout all of human history, demonstrates the omnipresence of such superhuman problem-finding tendencies. An interesting facet of this is that possessing the solutions to such problems, if such solutions did exist, (which is unlikely), would confer no survival advantage on individual, group, or species, other than relief from the burden of the problem itself. Having the answer to the question of what happens after a person dies would have almost zero impact on the ability of that person to stay alive, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of adaptive evolution. Such knowledge, were it available, would however provide relief from worrying about the problem, presumably freeing up attentional resources for more pressing concerns. Beyond this circular purpose, the big problems appear to have no function whatsoever. This is not to say that they should not be asked of course; addressing, or at least operating in the presence of, such questions is hugely enjoyable and entertaining, and the feelings associated with their possible solution are some of the most profound and overwhelming available to human beings. It is such feelings that we associate with meaning and purpose, and our attachment to the significance of such felt knowledge is at the heart of the human condition. One might almost say that these feelings and pleasures are addictive, so determinedly do we hang onto their source, the apparent solution to the big problems.

Posted in Evolution, Feeling, Problem, Religion, Science | No Comments »

Why Up is Good

March 17th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The superior access to knowledge that is implied by the use of height metaphors may also contribute toward the forming of a well-established metaphor which associates height with the abstract concept of ‘value’ or ‘goodness’. This is usually expressed within the conventional syntax of Conceptual Metaphor Theory as UP IS GOOD. Like all such metaphorical mappings this draws upon routine embodied sensorimotor experiences to structure and articulate what would otherwise be inconceivable; values such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are easily experienced in the particular but as general terms they make no impact on the senses, and can therefore only be conceptualised through the use of an organizing metaphor.

Evidence for the existence of the UP IS GOOD metaphorical mapping can be found in the extensive use of terms relating height to positive value or quality; we speak of ‘high value’, ‘high quality’, and ‘high performance’, and positive progress is usually considered as movement in an upward direction. When we wish to cite the ultimate authority we might refer to a ‘higher power’, or in more Earthly terms to someone who is at the top of their field, the top of their game, or the height of their success. We indicate value in commerce by saying that sales are up, production is up, employment is up, and profits are up, and we show this elevation on graphs and charts. We reach for the stars, climb the career ladder, move up the league, reach the top of the charts, and if we are churlish we might look down on those who are not at our level. In all of these instances the metaphorical correspondence between height and positive value is clear. In all cases UP IS GOOD. This consistency, in which positivity in many different areas is expressed using the same organizing metaphor, is strong evidence for its being grounded in a single experience or a small set of related experiences, ultimately originating in a common feature of our embodiment and the affordances it offers in relation to the environment in which it is embedded. Further evidence of the coherence and non-arbitrary nature of such an embodied metaphor is the fact that there is a complementary set of organizing metaphors which relate lack of height to negative value, expressible in the standard syntax as DOWN IS BAD. This is revealed in the badness of being ‘down in the dumps’, ‘beneath contempt’, ‘low on the totem pole’, a member of the ‘lower classes’ or possibly even the ‘underclass’, or ‘under the weather’. This correspondence in the relationships GOOD IS UP and DOWN IS BAD is a clear illustration of the non-arbitrary nature of these conceptual metaphors. The dimension of height, together with possible movement in this dimension, is an ‘image schema’ which structures a wide range of value-related concepts.

The most often cited origin for this schema refers to the common experience of acquiring and using material resources. In accumulating some kind of valuable resource, firewood for example, it is an obviousness that the more of this resource we accumulate the higher the pile will be. It follows from this completely embodied and indeed ancient fact of life that the pile of firewood which is high will have more value that one which is more lowly. Similarly, the height of a pile of fish, fruit, dead rabbits, projectile-sized rocks, gold, or any other substance which confers health, survival, or status, is a direct measure of the value of that pile. In terms of value, when it comes to the height of a pile of desirable material stuff, UP IS GOOD. This unambiguous and intuitive fact provides the concrete source from which we can structure, organise, and conceptualise the relative values of non-concrete entities such as ‘performance’, ‘esteem’, ‘profits’, ‘social status’, or ‘mood’. We may not be able to literally pile our achievements up and compare them to the pile of the guy next door, but when we use height-related terms to carry out such an evaluation that is, metaphorically, what we are doing.

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Why Up Feels Good

March 21st, 2008 Fred McVittie

Returning to the theme of height as an entailment of the metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING, I would like to offer an alternative to this explanation of the origin of the GOOD IS UP metaphor which has particular relevance to our overall understanding. In addition to the ‘high’ value implicit in a pile of desirable goods that achieves such height there is also the possible value conferred by placing oneself in a high place. It is a routine experience available to all of us that standing on high ground allows one to see further than standing on low ground, and there is undoubtedly a certain pleasure associated with this kind of elevated looking. To offer a view out across an expanse of land or sea; to look at distant mountains and clear to the horizon is every house-buyer and estate agent’s dream. Everyone wants a room with a view and our coastlines are dotted with pay-per-view telescopes to further service those desires. Presumably, for our ancestors vying for survival on the plains of West Africa, having the sense to find high ground, or the topmost branch of a tree, would grant enormous survival advantages. Up there one can see the approach of predators and the gathering clouds of an approaching storm. The wildebeest are visible from up here whereas to those less fortunate primates on the ground they may as well not exist at all. In such circumstances, nature would be remiss if it did not reward those of our forebears who rose to the occasion by making being-at-the-top feel good. It seems quite likely that the lingering liking we all have for the house on the hill, the cliff-top hotel, the sea-view and the top bunk is a remnant of those times when, for purely practical reasons, UP IS GOOD. It also seems reasonable to imagine that, if we needed a dimension to measure relative values of abstract concepts, then the height dimension would serve very well. Being able to see farther than other men not only confers a literal survival advantage, experienced aesthetically as pleasure, but the metaphorical elevation of oneself such that one might look out over an extended field of knowledge mirrors this embodied and experienced sense. Desire for the acquisition of knowledge, the ‘cognitive imperative’ as Newberg and D’Aquili call it, drives us up the tree. It is the great human survival trick, the equivalent of the bower bird’s nest and the beaver’s dam, and the gaining of knowledge is regarded as a high (sic) value activity. From this it follows that those metaphorical positions occupied by individuals who have access to enhanced knowledge would similarly be regarded as high value. In this analysis UP IS GOOD because, as an entailment of the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor, UP is the place where the really valuable seeing, and hence valuable knowing, takes place.

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