We all live in a simulation. Yet, this simulation is not created, as science fiction would suggest, by
higher forces or aliens. Neither are we part of a software such as the Matrix. The simulation we
live in is entirely constructed by us humans, our concepts, and our words.
It is the very last word, that was the most thought-provoking idea I encountered while reading this
book: Words.
In fact, it has been not only thought-provoking, but provoking in general by shaking grounds of
the very basis what defines us as humans – at least, that is what we feel: Emotions. Following this
line, the book itself is less about defining what emotions actually are; instead, the implications are
much more on the side of what emotions are not and how they are not created. The way we frame
the concept of emotions from now on may be not only a scientific revolution, but an
unprecedented one, affecting everyday perceptions of oneself and everyone around us; and at its
core lies the power of language and the words it is made of.
Sensations seem to arise automatically and uncontrollably, finding expression on our faces and in
our behavior, but in the end, it might be no more than an expression of culture: While the macro
structure of our brain is primarily predetermined by biology, the microwiring is not – leaving us as
the engineers of our very own simulation reality, with a toolset of language.
With emotions being experienceable only the moment we constitute a word for it, one realizes the
importance and power of languages, their differences in expression, and their impact on culture.
After all, it might not be emotions that set us apart from animals, but rather the extensive
vocabulary we have built over generations to assess and express our inner state – our interoception.
Just as words, emotions have been created by humans over millennia; and still, they are real in the
same sense that money is real; that is, they are hardly an illusion but a product of human agreement.
Yet, one might consider language and money to be two of humankind’s most substantial
inventions.
The same way, we have to learn words as we grow, we have to learn emotions as just another form
of expression; potentially an expression allowing for a more natural and deeper insight into each
other; but making it more individual, which shows the importance of understanding emotions, as
for words, in context and cultures. Eventually, emotions are mere words, a form of non-verbal
communication, deeply ingrained in humans, not by nature, but by culture. Here, Feldman Barrett
introduced perhaps the most meaningful conclusion, namely, it takes more than one human brain
to create a human mind. You can be the architect of other people’s feelings. Social reality implies
that we are all partly responsible for one another’s behavior, not in a society-blaming way, but a
brain-wiring way. By teaching concepts, i.e., words, to a child, we offer it to expand reality, a reality
that is purely mental: We are the screenwriters of our very own simulation, where words make a
difference.
Really, the idea of how varying levels of emotional granularity expressed through, after all, arbitrary
words affect the world we live in and ourselves, is striking: Looking at the rainbow example, just
the existence of another color word and hence category can entirely change our perception and
how we experience the world. Having seen that people with higher emotional granularity, i.e., more
emotion words, are generally healthier and recover faster, words are more than just verbal
expressions, but the building blocks of reality. The same way, words connect ideas in sentences,
they do in the brain through wiring. And so is this essay nothing less than the expression of ideas,
aligning our realities, consciously forming our world and minds.
Similarly, Feldman Barret made the claim on the book’s last page, that by reading the book we are
building a new reality together. With many ideas in common with Seth’s book “Being You” (the
sum of all parts, brain complexity, budgeting for survival, redness of chairs, …), what specifically
brings them together is their radical change of perspective, of turning things around against all
constituted beliefs and intuitions. The audacity to defy some of the greatest thinkers and even
more boldly, common sense, stands out remarkably like only a few others before.
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They turn things around: Not the emotions steer us, but we create and control them. In both
works, this goes beyond mere scientific statements, but actually explaining the importance of this
new way of thinking and feeling as vital to our well-being and the future of society itself.
Where Seth introduces drugs and hallucinations, Feldman Barrett refers more elegantly to science
and hypotheses – the idea, however, is the same: The brain spends an eternity in a dark silent room,
learning what is happening in- and outside its environment only indirectly through scraps of
information: Your brain has to make sense of those and its main clues are your past experiences:
We construct our very own world to regulate our body for survival by trying to understand the
world.
With “Being You” dealing with the side of consciousness and “How Emotions are Made” coming
instead from an angle of emotions, both target the fundamental ideas of being human; breaking
ground with our inherited belief system and demystifying the human mind: The respective
phenomena are reduced to merely learned concepts and remembered experiences. It is no longer
an innate wiring of circuits excited by unknown mechanisms but much more a well predicted and
created perception, reducing it to some kind of Bayesian estimation based on past experiences and
cultures. After all, we are just animals where emotional reactions are nothing more than the best
response in terms of survival. This way, one central question emerges when bringing together the
ideas of the two books: When an emotion, or experience in general, comes down to being just a
learned concept, what makes it so different from a feature in a neural network allowing to better
explain the (sensory) input?
With its immense repertoire of learned experiences and expressions, why shouldn’t ChatGPT
eventually express feelings, potentially even surpassing humans in terms of emotional granularity,
allowing for even more precise regulation.
Furthermore, in both books, free will has been broken down by the authors to be existent, because,
in the end, we are not wired as in the image of a reflex or a deterministic algorithm, but rather as
an ever-changing network of experiences – which sounds strikingly similar to a layman’s definition
of neural networks.
Similarly, hallucinations/simulations are nothing unique to large language models such as
ChatGPT. The brain itself is just a prediction machine coming up with its next best guess – acting
pretty much the way, experts criticize arguably intelligent systems for doing. Maybe, after all, we are
in the midst of creating something conscious and emotional, that one day will wonder if it is just
part of a simulation, or a computer program developed by higher forces?
Social reality is a human superpower – and it is up to us to decide how and where to use it. In the
end, it may be the one power that sets us apart as humans, that allowed us to create communities
and cultures, the scientific progress of this world, and, ultimately, me writing this essay…
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