Listened to the Invisibilia podcast about emotions. Actually dove-tails nicely with what I've been reading in Hume -- began his analysis of pride and humility in the second half of the Treatise. (Finished the first half of the Treatise -- first time I've ever read it all the way through.)
The podcast contains an interview of Liz Feldman, the author of a book called, How Emotions are Made. I skimmed some highlights from the interview at NPR's website, but I couldn't make much sense of them -- except for the provocative claim that emotions aren't real. Or at least, they aren't universal. The initial support for that, it sounded like, was that people could express different emotions in the same way depending on the culture (person, context). Someone could smile because he was afraid just as much as because he was happy. "But just because all the same responses are associated with happiness in context C and fear in context C' doesn't mean that happiness and fear themselves are constructed. The emotion is more than its characteristic expressions!" Anyway, I guessed we were dealing with some sort of functionalist account of emotion -- that an emotion is completely characterized by the circumstances that produce it and the circumstances it produces. Not too far a step to say that there are no emotions at all, but that in one culture people select these inputs and these outputs as pertinent to explanations of human behavior, in another culture, others.
After listening to the podcast, I learned the theory is slightly different. The underlying idea, I think, is that the basic ingredients that make up emotions, the "innate responses," are actually much less varied than we think. Instead of there being fear, love, joy, anger, there is something like positive and negative affect, pain or pleasure in a certain area of the body, the wrenching of the heart, tension in the throat. The brain (or, as older empiricists might have said, our mind) then considers how the situation might resemble past situations in which it has had the same affects. As an additional wrinkle, it also considers what it has been told about the situations in which such affects are experienced. The whole range of experiences before its, it then groups together into a concept, the emotion: "This is what I'm feeling right now -- and it is because I'm feeling this that I have such and such sensations." Emotions are like dreams: they result from the brain's (the mind's) attempt to explain more basic impressions.
Feldman offers an additional wrinkle: because to a certain extent our concepts arise from what we're taught, as well as the way we understand our experiences, we are in control of our emotions. Through a process of analysis, we might come to unthink -- perhaps not fear in general, but a specific fear, say of insects. Just realize that there's a difference between what you've been told, what you expect, and the unpleasant sensations you feel when you see squirming things, and gradually those sensations will cease to be so pronounced. The upshot of this, is that, what we can control, we are responsible for (Nietzsche). So if you get PTSD or something, insofar as that is an emotion that results from concepts, you, or at least the context that produced said concepts, are making yourself feel it.
The whole account is a lot to chew on, obviously. That's why Liz Feldman has a PhD in her field! Still, I have an initial wariness about it. I find the idea that emotions are universal ways of making sense of human behavior appealing. It seems borne out by my own experience, both in terms of the way I understand other people and my understanding of myself. Also, I encounter this idea a lot in psychology -- that actually, what's going on in my mind is mysterious, and my normal understanding of my mind is in fact an artifact of my own mind's ad hoc attempts to explain itself. In general, I think that the mind is perhaps a little less transparent than you would at first think, but I feel the psychologists go too far in this direction, and make it out that introspection is completely unreliable.
(That's why they always talk about the brain instead of the mind -- if we were talking about the mind, it would be easy for every man to think that he has some experience of the object being discussed and so has some competence to evaluate the theories proposed -- but few people have ever seen their own brain, and it's easy to imagine when the brain is under consideration that you have little understanding of how the sausage gets made.)
Another thing that bothered me about the show is that, once the hosts and their guest had identified concepts as the true source of emotions, they treated it as obvious that emotions must be constructed. Certainly we create our own concepts! -- But that's not what we learn in philosophy classes. Concepts don't all result from experience -- some concepts are required to make any sense out of experience at all. That is, some concepts are innate. It isn't that everybody believes this, but it's at least a widely held view -- so I think it shows either a lack of responsibility or else a lack of depth on the hosts' part for not making this view a part of the discussion. Anyway, some sorts of feelings are going to be innate -- the positive and negative affects -- so it seems like the question is only going to be the extent to which our emotions are constructed -- most or some.
One example in particular caught my attention from the podcast. I was told that someone who has just had surgery to treat cataracts, and who had been unable to see for a long time prior to that, would not be able to see many of the things we think of as forming the building blocks of our daily visual experience. You wouldn't see an apple on the table, simple alternating patches of darkness and brightness. "This is because such an individual doesn't have concepts like 'apple' and 'table' -- these concepts have to be learned from experience."
That's the sort of constructivism you get -- suddenly it seems like the whole world isn't here at all, just some amorphous mass that the mind organizes this way and, the constructivist muses, could perhaps be constructed another way -- if only we would open the doors of conception.
"Well," I wondered: "Brightness and darkness? No colors or color-like percepts?"
Because if you say that the person who has just undergone surgery has only some amorphous sort of visual experience, that's quite different than if you say that the person sees something that very much looks red, but it's all fuzzy. Much the same situation arises if you think about what we see when we encounter a foreign alphabet. Because we don't have concepts of the letters before us to organize our experience. So how much like the letters is our perception of them at that point? If it is very much like the letters -- if what we see has the same general contours as what a literate speaker of that language sees, only we don't know how to attend to those contours -- then the theory is much less striking, much less sexy, than say our idea of what the sky looks like to two cultures with two very different systems of astrology. But I would guess seeing without concepts is more like looking at letters than looking at Rorschach blots. There is construction, but it doesn't do all the work, so it isn't as interesting as the constructivists make it out to be.
The podcast contains an interview of Liz Feldman, the author of a book called, How Emotions are Made. I skimmed some highlights from the interview at NPR's website, but I couldn't make much sense of them -- except for the provocative claim that emotions aren't real. Or at least, they aren't universal. The initial support for that, it sounded like, was that people could express different emotions in the same way depending on the culture (person, context). Someone could smile because he was afraid just as much as because he was happy. "But just because all the same responses are associated with happiness in context C and fear in context C' doesn't mean that happiness and fear themselves are constructed. The emotion is more than its characteristic expressions!" Anyway, I guessed we were dealing with some sort of functionalist account of emotion -- that an emotion is completely characterized by the circumstances that produce it and the circumstances it produces. Not too far a step to say that there are no emotions at all, but that in one culture people select these inputs and these outputs as pertinent to explanations of human behavior, in another culture, others.
After listening to the podcast, I learned the theory is slightly different. The underlying idea, I think, is that the basic ingredients that make up emotions, the "innate responses," are actually much less varied than we think. Instead of there being fear, love, joy, anger, there is something like positive and negative affect, pain or pleasure in a certain area of the body, the wrenching of the heart, tension in the throat. The brain (or, as older empiricists might have said, our mind) then considers how the situation might resemble past situations in which it has had the same affects. As an additional wrinkle, it also considers what it has been told about the situations in which such affects are experienced. The whole range of experiences before its, it then groups together into a concept, the emotion: "This is what I'm feeling right now -- and it is because I'm feeling this that I have such and such sensations." Emotions are like dreams: they result from the brain's (the mind's) attempt to explain more basic impressions.
Feldman offers an additional wrinkle: because to a certain extent our concepts arise from what we're taught, as well as the way we understand our experiences, we are in control of our emotions. Through a process of analysis, we might come to unthink -- perhaps not fear in general, but a specific fear, say of insects. Just realize that there's a difference between what you've been told, what you expect, and the unpleasant sensations you feel when you see squirming things, and gradually those sensations will cease to be so pronounced. The upshot of this, is that, what we can control, we are responsible for (Nietzsche). So if you get PTSD or something, insofar as that is an emotion that results from concepts, you, or at least the context that produced said concepts, are making yourself feel it.
The whole account is a lot to chew on, obviously. That's why Liz Feldman has a PhD in her field! Still, I have an initial wariness about it. I find the idea that emotions are universal ways of making sense of human behavior appealing. It seems borne out by my own experience, both in terms of the way I understand other people and my understanding of myself. Also, I encounter this idea a lot in psychology -- that actually, what's going on in my mind is mysterious, and my normal understanding of my mind is in fact an artifact of my own mind's ad hoc attempts to explain itself. In general, I think that the mind is perhaps a little less transparent than you would at first think, but I feel the psychologists go too far in this direction, and make it out that introspection is completely unreliable.
(That's why they always talk about the brain instead of the mind -- if we were talking about the mind, it would be easy for every man to think that he has some experience of the object being discussed and so has some competence to evaluate the theories proposed -- but few people have ever seen their own brain, and it's easy to imagine when the brain is under consideration that you have little understanding of how the sausage gets made.)
Another thing that bothered me about the show is that, once the hosts and their guest had identified concepts as the true source of emotions, they treated it as obvious that emotions must be constructed. Certainly we create our own concepts! -- But that's not what we learn in philosophy classes. Concepts don't all result from experience -- some concepts are required to make any sense out of experience at all. That is, some concepts are innate. It isn't that everybody believes this, but it's at least a widely held view -- so I think it shows either a lack of responsibility or else a lack of depth on the hosts' part for not making this view a part of the discussion. Anyway, some sorts of feelings are going to be innate -- the positive and negative affects -- so it seems like the question is only going to be the extent to which our emotions are constructed -- most or some.
One example in particular caught my attention from the podcast. I was told that someone who has just had surgery to treat cataracts, and who had been unable to see for a long time prior to that, would not be able to see many of the things we think of as forming the building blocks of our daily visual experience. You wouldn't see an apple on the table, simple alternating patches of darkness and brightness. "This is because such an individual doesn't have concepts like 'apple' and 'table' -- these concepts have to be learned from experience."
That's the sort of constructivism you get -- suddenly it seems like the whole world isn't here at all, just some amorphous mass that the mind organizes this way and, the constructivist muses, could perhaps be constructed another way -- if only we would open the doors of conception.
"Well," I wondered: "Brightness and darkness? No colors or color-like percepts?"
Because if you say that the person who has just undergone surgery has only some amorphous sort of visual experience, that's quite different than if you say that the person sees something that very much looks red, but it's all fuzzy. Much the same situation arises if you think about what we see when we encounter a foreign alphabet. Because we don't have concepts of the letters before us to organize our experience. So how much like the letters is our perception of them at that point? If it is very much like the letters -- if what we see has the same general contours as what a literate speaker of that language sees, only we don't know how to attend to those contours -- then the theory is much less striking, much less sexy, than say our idea of what the sky looks like to two cultures with two very different systems of astrology. But I would guess seeing without concepts is more like looking at letters than looking at Rorschach blots. There is construction, but it doesn't do all the work, so it isn't as interesting as the constructivists make it out to be.
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