Week 8 and 9 missing (check for 7 also missing I guess too) Week 10 notes EMOTION AND COGNITION 10 A: what counts as “cognitive”? Research since the 1990s has tried to refine both our theories of cognition and our theories of what emotions are so that there can be a better fit EMOTION AND REASON IN PLATO In other words, emotion has tended to be a significant object of philosophical inquiry only insofar as philosophers have been concerned with its deleterious effects on reasoning Plato lays out his tripartite theory of the soul, which is, really, the first attempt at a systematic psychology in the western intellectual tradition. The soul has three parts: the appetites, the spirit, and reason For Plato, with the exception of intellectual love (love of knowledge and truth), the emotions are associated with the spirit and the appetites Rhetoric certainly has a logical component. One has to make arguments, sooner or later. This kind of rational appeal is called logos, and we certainly can and do make appeals to the rational part of our nature in rhetoric. But rhetoric also trades in ethos, or authoritative speech (appealing to expertise, social standing of the speaker, etc.), and to pathos, or emotional communication, sometimes through explicit speech, but often through body-language, gesture, and tone EMOTION AND REASON IN THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION “Passions” are really just an old-fashioned term for the emotions. The passions are the actions of the body on the soul; the soul “suffers” from these interventions from the body. When these emotions grow too strong, they can overpower the mind. PLATONIC AND CARTESIAN LEGACIES The formal claims are true or false in virtue of their form alone; the empirical claims are true or false depending on whether or not they are verified by our experience of the world. No other claims have any cognitive significance at all Where do emotions fit in this picture? The standard view, in philosophy and cognitive psychology, has been to treat them as “non-cognitive” psychological states… cant be composed into thorughts as true or false Emotions do not carry the sorts of meaning that we can track using a formal rule system Once we assume a particular kind of computational theory, we simply do not have the right apparatus in place to even represent emotions, though we can emulate emotional response using purely computational resources Simply referring to emotions as “non-cognitive” will not do. We need a theory of how they fit into cognitive science. 10 B: BODIES, BRAINS, AND FEELINGS The Portuguese-American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (b. 1944) proposes that our current bind in cognitive science is part of a Cartesian legacy DAMASIO AND DESCARTES’ ERROR All we need to know about the underlying implementing mechanism is that it is capable of running the software; once we've established that basic fact we can turn our attention entirely to the program. Damasio argues that this is “Descartes’ Error”, and we are still working within its confines If we take the view, as Damasio hopes we will, that the whole organism (with its whole brain) enters into cognitive processes, then we will soon see that there is a role for emotion in cognition MOVING PAST DESCARTES – BRAIN SCIENCE AND EMOTION Damasio is arguing against the Platonic, Cartesian (and Enlightenment!) view that the passions really only negatively interfere with higher-order cognition, especially reasoning and planning In order to support his position, he examines a number of people who have suffered brain damage to those parts of the brain associated with emotionality. These people all have an inability to feel emotion So, somatic markers are bodily events that, in normal situations, we can attend to or focus upon in conscious experience Damasio identifies the emotions with how you feel these bodily changes when they are represented in the relevant parts of the brain The evidence from lesion studies of the brain, both historical and contemporary, shows us that emotion is also processed in the forebrain, in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex Because these areas are associated with emotion, Damasio uses this evidence to hypothesize that reasoning actually calls upon emotion. Effective reasoning (reasoning that is relatively quick, properly motivated, and that tends to lead to beneficial action) is affective reasoning Desacrtes’ error was therefore not only in the separation of mind from body (the separation of res cogitans from res extensa), but also the separation of the passions from reasoning HOW WE OUGHT TO REASONS One might want to argue that Damasio has shown us how we actually reason, but that Descartes was more or less correct about how we ought to reason Emotions not only assist in thinking through consequences. They are central to those processes CURIOUS CASE OF PHINEAS GAGE damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex Emotional disregulation in such patients is often associated with social dysfunction and problems with future planning. In particular, it is not odd for patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to be bad with money They seem to be deficits regarding the ability to evaluate actions in light of likely outcomes 10 C: EMOTIONS, THOUGHTS, AND PERCEPTIONS In this lesson, we will examine ways of bringing emotions into computational models of cognition Cognitivism identifies the emotions with propositional attitudes, in particular belief and desire According to these subjective perceptual theories, emotions are not features of an external reality that we glom onto in perception, but internal states of the agent that affect the content one encounters in perception By contrast, objective perceptual theories argue that emotions pick out objective features of the world. If Damasio is right, and emotions reliably track bodily changes, and if bodily changes co-vary with environmental changes, then emotions become the primary way of representing certain kinds of environmental change that might not be perceptible otherwise At the very least, we want emotions to be closely aligned with representational states and processes so we can make sense of them using the Computational-Representational Theory of Mind COMPUTABLE EMOTIONS Real human beings are like HOTCO at least in the sense that emotion can be intimately tied to propositional contents that we judge to be true or false Wagar and Thagard show us how emotional cognition both functions and malfunctions based on whether or not there is communication between the emotional parts of the brain, those parts associated with reward, and those parts associated with decision-making and planning EMOTION, BELIEF, AND APPRAISAL The basic idea behind cognitivist theories of emotion is this: emotions can be strongly correlated, if not identified, with cognitive states (basic one identifies it as set of judgments) Judgments are like assertions Appraisal theorists argue that appraisals or evaluations of a given situation can cause emotional or affective response, even when there is no physiological arousal The world has a way of telling us that some of our beliefs are false; the emotions are the painful messaging system — especially painful for those of us who don’t do well in tracking reality PROBLEMS WITH COGNITIVISM If emotions are too closely associated with the propositional attitudes of belief and desire, then we run the risk of having to say that children and animals aren’t capable of emotion, But almost all cognitive ethologists think there is a great deal of similarity between us and very intelligent nonhuman animals when it comes to emotional cognition Another criticism of cognitivism is that it maintains that emotional rationality is tied to the rationality of beliefs and desires. But surely there is such a thing as a person who has rational beliefs and desires but who is emotionally irrational EMOTION AND PERCPETURAL REPRESENTATION Damasio, following James and Lange, provides us with what looks on the surface to be a noncognitive theory of emotions Cognitivists make the mistake of thinking that emotion has to be so closely associated with evaluative thoughts or judgments. For Damasio and Prinz, by contrast, it is about perceiving what is happening in the body James, Lange, Damasio, and Prinz all agree that emotions are states of sensory systems that respond to changes in the body hey are responses to the body in interoception. Interoception is the special sensory capacity that allows you to feel what’s going on inside your body, e.g. feeling hungry or thirsty, or feeling hot or cold Prinz argues that emotion is tied to perception, but this requires him to have an account of perception that makes clear how it can accommodate emotions. First, perception takes place in sensory systems that convert sensory information into mental representations. Second, perception involves the generation of internal representations, which usually represent mind-external stimuli. Third, perception can be consciously experienced Fourth, perception is “quasi-modular” in that it processes information in mostly involuntary ways that cannot be entirely determined by higher-order cognitive processes. If the register (and successive registers like this one) are reliably associated with a particular state of affairs (or type of state), then they can represent that state of affairs While emotions are interoceptive states, they aren’t representative of those bodily states Emotions represent because they can do more than track what is going on in our bodies. They also serve the role of mapping what is going on in our environment via what is going on in our bodies One nice thing about Prinz's account is that beings with similar evolutionary histories might be able to register bodily states, thereby representing concerns lurking in the external environment, much the same way we do COCNLUSION Emotions are (arguably) representational, but it is not clear whether they are associated with purely conceptual representations (propositions or judgments), or whether they are more intimately tied to our perceptual system
