The definition and usage of the term have changed over time. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Sure, and you'd have to be a moron not to recognize it's predominant contemporary usage. Or just ignorant, take your pick.

I love you too, sweetiepie. Wish you had a clue though.

Imagine asking someone to think historically while literally not knowing what neoliberalism is.

Democracy means doing what you're told and propping up a failing and corrupt system until a philosopher-king gets into power. — Baden

Can you imagine, this is supposed to be the 'sensible' position? Fantasy gone wild - suicidal.

Fascists often offer 'stability and competence' which for the most part probably accounts for a great deal of their strategic allure and political success. It appeals to the element of self-satisfaction that simply says: "I don't care what the policies are, I just don't want to be made to feel bad and icky". 'Stability' isn't a political value: it's a value for those who would prefer not to care, but are being forced to. A self-centered hedonistic minima. It's what infants value when prodded out of their sleep. 'Stability' is what middle management offers the executive in the face of strikes. Political garbage and democratic suicide.

Probably.

'The will' is a grammatical mistake. A modal verb mistaken for a substantive and pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all. The less it is taken seriously the better.

Glenn Greenwald is an international treasure.

Gosh he's squirming like the worm he is lol.

It gets better! In the interests of non-partisanship:

My God Trump displaying how Godawfulfuckingstupid he is is the second most entertaining thing to have happened all day, the most entertaining being watching watching people trying to defend him - including Trump "I was just being sarcastic" himself. It's the force multiplication of morons. And the memes my god the memes.

To be fair, anyone who holds Trump to any standard at all hasn't been paying attention.

I think the best thing about Trump is that he's like a sieve for stupidity - you can watch people out their retardation in real time while trying to defend him. It's the most glorious show.

It's just his programming he can't help it.

Oh look there's one now lmao

Fuckin retard supporters lol

Nah Trump's just the fuckin idiot everyone knows he is lmao

Fuckin retard in charge of that country lol

Listen mack, lemme tell ya something, way back when there were only two genders and not uhhhhhh four, we used to ask the girls to the sock hop and then take her to the diner for a nice malt. And guess what, I never saw color so I always ordered chocolate! And if the girl didn't like that I would leave her there and by the way if china men I mean China doesn't own up to the coronavirus I mean if Donald China doesn't take some damn responsibility we're going to have some serious issues and I'm going to wait hold on hold on get her up her yeah yeah let me smell her hair, ok no no that's fine, ok so i would always order vanilla no sorry strawberry and if the girl ordered chocolate I knew she was a keeper, and that's why if a medicare for all bill came to my desk I would rip it in shreds — Maw

Which interview was this from?

/s

@baden, @javra

Some elaboration, via the philosopher John Protvei, on the stakes of thinking about emotion as an impersonal, social entity:

To appreciate the full radicality of this notion of emotion as an “interindividual process,” we must add that those neural changes have to be thought in relation to the modifications to the emergent functional unit of the couple or group in which the component individuals are interacting. The neural bases of this interindividual process are found in each person’s brain, but the unit we are analyzing is nonsubjective but relational, that is, interindividual

...We should also note at the outset that this emergent neuro-somatic-social emotional process need not only be equilibrium seeking; too often, any mention of group processes is seen as equilibrium seeking (negative feedback) as in “functionalist” sociology. Rather, we are all familiar with interpersonal emotions that spin out of control in positive feedback loops (a mob rage, of course, but on the positive side of the ledger, falling in love cannot really be seen as equilibrium seeking, even if a stable, loving couple results, for that stability can be a mutually reinforcing dynamic process of empowerment that never settles down to anything we can describe as an equilibrium). ... Adult structures, that is, adult patterns of interaction, are themselves individuations of a distributed and differential social field — John Protevi Life, War, Earth

(Protevi was writing this is a totally different context - in fact in response to a reading of the work of the neuropsyhcologist Bruce Wexler - but it applies mutatis mutandis to Barrett's own theory of emotions).

Is it possible that basic needs taken care of, the quality of experience of being a "winner" and a "loser" can only be distinguished to the degree a certain social narrative is consciously/subconsciously accepted and so on. — Baden

Yeah, one of the things that follows very clearly from this account is what might be called the socaility of emotion. If emotion is a matter of bodily, predictive, conceptual evaluation, and if this evaluation does not always proceed bottom-up but also top-down, then it follows that the exact individuation of affect (as this emotion rather than that one, or indeed as a strong emotion at all), can be (and is) profoundly socially modulated. And just as Barrett talks of 'anger scripts' which are variously employed, one can quite as easily talk of 'pride scripts' or 'shame scripts', which, like all 'scripts' always imply a degree of impersonality to them (to 'follow a script' or 'act in accordance with a script', is, in someways, a delegation of agency, or better, an exercise of agency through 'third party' means).

So there's absolutely a social element - an irreducible social element - to the production of shame and pride (why shame in these circumstances? Why these objects of pride?). I mean, even the terms you used - winner and loser - are immediately socially differentiated terms (loser compared to who? Winner among which population? And on whose terms?). And this is one of the really cool things about Barrett's account - the mutual implication of the bio-social in ways that implicate the social right at the level of biology. I mean, consider the ways in which scripts are 'represented':

"When applied to representing knowledge about emotion, the idea is that the human brain captures every instance of core affect that is labeled as anger. Information is captured as it occurs in perception represented in sensory cortices), action (represented in motor cortex), and interoception (represented a
somatovisceral information in insular cortex). The word occurs is used here to refer to instances where affective behaviors or events are labeled as anger when the category anger is first being learned. Later, these modality-specific states are available to be reactivated to represent knowledge about anger. When retrieving information about anger, sensory, motor, and interoceptive states are partially reinstated in the relevant aspects of cortex, simulating an instance of anger".

- One can't distinguish, except for analytic purposes, between the social and the biological: the biological is directly sculpted, in it's plasticity, by the social. There's a whole ethics and politics of our biology here that is super interesting and worth investigating.

If “to be aware of” is “to experience” then not all experiences are empirical. As one example, I can enactively experience my decisions (illusory or not) at the instant they are made by me, for I hold awareness of them, but will not gain this awareness via sensory receptors. — javra

I actually agree with this in full. In fact, perhaps the thing that most powerfully interests me in Barrett's account of emotion is that it leaves open this very possibility. Barrett indeed makes some moves in this direction when she notes that A:

"A simulation of anger could allow a person to go beyond the information given to fill in aspects of a core affective response that are not present at a given perceptual instance. In such a case, the simulation essentially produces an illusory correlation between response outputs" — Solving...

(my bolding)

And that B:

"Ample evidence shows that ongoing brain activity influences how the brain processes incoming sensory information and that neurons fire intrinsically within large networks without any need for external stimuli" — The Theory...

.

Taken together, what's at stake is the ability of conceptual evaluation to become 'runaway processes', that is, processes that becomes 'exapted' from their original purpose and attain a certain degree of autonomy. The fact that conceptual evalution (qua conscious emotional registration) takes place on a 'second-level' as it were, is what enables an account of disjunctions betwen affect and emotion such that you get emotional 'misfirings', or even, in some of the cases you're talking about, the development of complex emotion-concepts which are ascribed to core affects without being strictly warranted by them.

In other words, the 'mapping' from affect to emotion is not unidirectional or guaranteed, which indeed why a the same affective state can give rise to different emotions, depending on top-down 'constraints' (language is the example that Barrett often given as such a constraint, but so too can be one's entire environmental situation). This is what is in the background between the discussion between @fdrake and myself about the question of emotional 'in/felicity' which @Issac was inquiring about: it's a question emotions 'running away' from their sensory bases and attaining a degree of quasi-autonomy from them.

The last thing I'll add here is that this is so powerful because it account, in a thoroughly naturalist way - for the richness of emotion. On the 'classical account' there would always need to be some kind of one-to-one correspondence between affect and emotion (if indeed the distinciton is acknowledged as all): there would be a distinct CNS state for envy, one for longing, for schadenfreude, for nostalgia, for every possible conceivable emotion, all hard-wired and then merely 'expressed'.

(Recall, in this connection, Socrates' unease when Parmenides confronts him with the question of whether or not there are Ideas - perfect Forms - of dirt, mud, and filth: Socrates totally fudges the question, precisely because these essentialist accounts are totally unable to confront the emergence of novelty).

On this account however, novel emotions ('niche' emotions?) come about precisely on account of the formation of new, 'non-empirical' concepts that are brought to bear on affects that are tailored to bring to attention novel features of one's behavioural/environmental state. It is precisely because of the complexity that can be built-in at the level of concepts which means that it is unnecessary that there be an affect for every conceivable emotion. It's only by acknowledging the 'autonomy' of the conceptual that you open the door to a rich emotional life that is not bound to a limited number of 'affective pre-sets', as it were.

I don't see why this is some kind of either-or. Anyone can see the almost the entirity of the US ruling class - from Cuomo who closed schools way, way, way too late, to Las Vagas' mayor who recently offered to kill her poor just to see what happens, to Trump, whose shitfuckery needs no introduction - is utterly shit and that the US is just a terrible place and everything about it sucks and is devised to kill its citizens. I think this is a fair compromise.

And of course Larry Summers, who helped Obama devise the last criminal bailout of the rich while leaving the poor to burn, is advising Biden on CV recovery. God, everything about your leaders is just total trash.

Oh yes and I forgot about the shithead governer of some buttfuck state somewhere the other day, who, on TV in a mask, gloves, and full, gleaming blue protective gear, told his state that reopening is totally safe and everything is fine. There's no debate here: US leadership is uniformly terrible, and it is led by someone whose incompetence is the mutiplictive product of all of them.

The OP seemed to indicate that we were in conscious control of our emotions, e.g. saying that emotions are the "outcome of an evaluative process", which e.g. could be used to deter a bully. — Luke

Ah, apologies if my OP gave off that impression, which, on review, probably does. Was trying to condense alot of info into a few short paragraphs and the qualification that the evaluative process in question was mostly non-conscious was something I probably should have added. As to your question - 'how does our conscious feeling of emotions tie into this?', I think the answer is that conscious feeling makes available additional cognitive resources in order to evaluate one's situation, specifically resources like language ("I am feeling angry") and general rational reflexivity ("should I be feeling angry?"). On a quick skim through of the papers I've read the closest I found was this:

"The experience of emotion is presumed to emerge when the feeling state is attended to, whether by deliberate introspection, or because the feeling state has rapid onset or intensity." (Solving, p.3).

I think though that the language of 'constraint' that Barrett and her colleagues use in her short paper on language that @Issac posted is useful: insofar as emotions are largely ambiguous and 'uncertain' (or as I prefer to say, differential) in their significance, and become more and more individuated on the basis of context (i.e the same feeling may be emotionally experienced as anger in one context, grief in another), consciousness and language help provide additional context. Here is Barrett et. al. on language: "emotion words (with associated conceptual content) that become accessible serve to reduce the uncertainty that is inherent in most natural facial behaviours and constrain their meaning to allow for quick and easy perceptions of emotion." The very act of calling an emotion anger serves to help individuate it, and alter body states (remember: emotion functions as a prediction about the best distribution of bodily resources).

In the same manner, if conscious feeling allows for prolonged consideration of emotion (over time periods longer than the largely 'automatic' mirco-temporality of brain processes: see the distinction that @possibility worte of between the two-levels of brain processing - quick/intuitive and slow/deliberative), then the 'rise to consciousness' is effectively the provision of more sustained context-making resources in order to better make emotion-predictions, or indeed, 'purely' rational ones ("I'm thoroughly pissed off at you at the moment, but it's in my interests to not punch you in your face"). This last but is somewhat speculative on my part (again, perhaps Barrett addresses this more in her book), but is motivated by Barrett's hypothesis the emotions are part of the brain's architecture which helps it "regulate your autonomic nervous system, your immune system and your endocrine system as resources are spent in seeking and securing more resources" ("The theory of constructed emotion").

It's not an assumption, it's the basis of the account being given. Again this is pretty basic stuff - I no longer think it wise to take you seriously on this unless you demonstrate your understanding.

The vast variety of ways of displaying anger and other emotions. Why assume there is some one thing in common with them all? — jkg20

Huh? This is exactly what the paper argues against??

As a consequence, situated conceptualizations of anger are heterogeneous. Packets of conceptual knowledge about anger will vary within a person over instances as context and situated action demand. No single situated conceptualization for anger need give a complete account of the category anger. There is not one script for anger, but many. On any given occasion, the content of a situated conceptualization for anger will be constructed to contain mainly those properties of anger that are contextually relevant, and it therefore contains only a small subset of the knowledge available in long-term memory about the category anger.

The situation, then, will largely determine which representation of anger will be constructed to conceptualize a state of core affect, with the result that the experience of anger (or of any emotion) will be sculpted by the situation. This idea is, in principle, consistent with the fundamental assumption of appraisal views of emotion: The meaning of a situation to a particular person at a particular point in time is related to the emotion that is experienced. — p.33

This is the 2nd time you've made an objection based on something the paper directly disavows. That emotions are 'natural kinds' with unifying features is the biggest target of the account which it aims to dismantle at every point. I'm beginning to think you haven't read it at all, or if you have, you haven't understood much, if any of it.

There is not muh too it really. I'm simply expressing some scepticism that, psychologically, there is anything systematic and appropriate for scientific investigation going on when people exhibit emotional behaviour. — jkg20

On what grounds? And how does that relate to what you said before?

"We don't always have emotion experiences, even when we are being emotional." — jkg20

It's hard to know what to make of this. Perhaps you can elaborate.

(Quick, play before a mod notices and moves this thread to The Lounge were no one will be able to see it... — Banno

Too late.

Plain and simple, philosophers are not qualified to understand things. They have not developed minds capable of solving problems — Greylorn Ell

Okay buddy *pats*. Make sure you untwist your panties on the way out.

I think you uh, posted this in the wrong thread.

So not only do we experience emotions now, we also experience our feeling an emotion. How do we do that? I can feel angry, can I also experience that feeling? Would it make any difference if I did not? — jkg20

I really don't understand your objection. Like, what is your actual point? That we don't always experience emotion? Thay emotion is somehow unreal? Not sure what to make of your rhetorical questions.

Can there be involuntary emotions, according to this theory? — Luke

I'm not entirely clear about how volition fits into the picture here, if at all. I think Barrett does have alot to say about it in her book, but I haven't yet read it. Maybe @Possiblity can shed some light here? At this point, I think I can say this: it's less a question of whether emotions are voluntary or not (they arise at the intersection of some very complex and layered bio-social interactions and processes) so much as how one goes about relating to one's emotions. Insofar as emotions are, to a certain degree, impersonal and public (they are responses to environmental situations), it's a question of adjusting that mode of response.

Check out the talk below where she talks about means of 'transforming one's emotional life' and 'being the architect of your experience'. What complicates the question of 'voluntarism' is that such means require, as it were, habituation, training, and learning. The voluntarism here isn't a kind of spontaneous 'I can feel whatever I want" but more a result of long and engaged processes of emotional discipline and training (which I really like as an idea: discipline as a condition of freedom). It also provides a nice summary of her account in general, perhaps better for those who don't want to wade through the walls of writing here:

Have you considered metaphysical Voluntarism? Meaning, the intellect is subordinate to the Will — 3017amen

I have very little positive to say about 'the will', so I'm afraid I don't have much to say about it in connection with the OP at all.

Maybe one way of condensing Barrett's points about errors is that they are more like infelicities of speech acts — fdrake

Ahhh of course! I'm kicking myself for not having thought of that! Felicitous and infelicitous emotions - of course. This way of thinking allows one to bring in the whole philosophical machinery of speech-act theory and the question of repetition and novelty.... Just to spit out some thoughts: there's the whole question of the 'publicness' of speech-acts, the fact that not just any speech-act will be felicitous, and that certain conditions need to be in place. Which here corresponds to the fact that the criteria that identify emotion and never wholly your own, and anger is a script, or set of scripts (the language of 'scripts of anger' that Barrett uses is incredibly interesting!), which again has the beautiful effect of turning the topology of emotion inside-out, making the most intimate public, and the public, intimate.

And then you have the 'subversive' readings of speech act theory (Derrida, Butler), where speech-acts have the capacity function to transform the context out of which they are birthed (the reclamation of certain slurs, for instance) which, when thought about in terms of emotion, brings a whole different ethical and political dimension into it. I'm thinking things like - subversive reactions - laughing at a threat; anger at a joke; impassivity among celebration, each of which can be invoked to short-circuit the emotional logic of a particular situation (respectively: "you can't hurt me at all"/"that's a terrible joke at that person's expense"/"this is not something to celebrate"): emotion as a transformative act, or means of transformation.

So perhaps a transcendental illusion in this context would be an enduring or widespread heuristic bias that the machine of active inference is likely to pick up (on a population level), and even then they could not easily be distinguished from cultural effects. — fdrake

This makes a great deal of sense too. I can't help but think about this in terms of Deleuze's account of the confusion of process for product - of identities as primary with respect to the differences which in fact gave rise to them ('tracing the transcendental from the empirical'). Here I think you're right: it's the projection of emotions as natural kinds (as origins) which are then subsequently expressed which just is the most 'natural' illusion par excellence.

This makes sense on Kant's terms too: transcendental illusions arise when the faculties of intelligibility are not limited by the conditions of sensibility and claim to bear upon 'thing-in-themselves'. Barrett's account has a very similar sensibility/intelligibility split and here you can kind of talk about the application of concepts (so Kantian already in it's language!) working independently of the conditions of sensibility ('core affect'!) and 'going rogue', as it were, but nonetheless ascribing the formation of a emotion-concept to emerging wholly from 'within' the emotional subject. The 'illusion' to constantly ward off - and to which we will always return - is the ascription of emotion as wholly personal, as brute, visceral eruption (to counter: invoke Spinoza's third form of knowledge).

So what does it tell us when someone can not learn a emotion? Personally I believe both point to emotions being something build into us rather then just learned during life — Colin Cooper

It's an interesting question - I imagine that there must indeed be certain neurological features, which, when underdeveloped or malformed, inhibit the bodily instantiation of an empathy concept or something similar. But this doesn't pose an objection to the account of emotion given here. That certain neural features must be in place is not something the account denies. In fact it is premised on the development of very specific neural structures that enable emotions to be expressed in the way they are. In any case the rest of your post simply repeats your previous ones. As it is, I'll stick to the science rather than tales about the Garden of Eden and so fourth.

I would suggest that there is persistent disagreement in philosophy because agreement is not a goal, even an incidental one, of philosophy. Agreement and even disagreement are auxiliary activities, extrinsic criteria that operate precisely where philosophy stops.

Skim read closer!

"Like beliefs and memories, however, emotions are not things. They are states. ...The experience of emotion is not the result of an “inner eye” perceiving an object called “core affect.” Instead, it is probably more correct to say that both valuation and categorization processes change the state of the person to create an emergent product that is at once affective and conceptual" (p. 35)

The inner eye metaphor is quite a good one. I suspect it characterises quite nicely the 'spontaneous' approach to emotion that alot of people have.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/de-blasios-social-distancing-tip-line-flooded-with-obscenities/

"Mayor Bill de Blasio’s critics let him know how they really felt about him ordering New Yorkers to snitch on each other for violating social-distancing rules — by flooding his new tip line with crank complaints including “dick pics” and people flipping the bird, The Post has learned."

Glory to the people.

We are born with emotions in place — Colin Cooper

This is a common view, but it is not one that seems to be substantiated by the evidence. To quote Barrett's review article:

A brief review of the emotion literature indicates that, even after 100 years of research, the scientific status of emotions as natural kinds remains surprisingly unclear. In every domain of emotion research, there is some evidence for the view that emotion categories like anger, sadness, and fear carve nature at its joints. But there is also steadily accumulating evidence against the natural-kind view. Strong correlations among self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures of emotion do not consistently materialize as expected, calling into question the idea that anger, sadness, fear, and so on are homeostatic property clusters that can be identified in observable data. It is difficult, if not impossible, to characterize any emotion category by a group of instances that resemble one another in their correlated properties. That is, it is difficult, if not impossible, to empirically identify the extensions of each emotion category.

Nor does the empirical record provide strong evidence for distinct causal mechanisms for each emotion. Emotion categories such as anger, sadness, and fear have thus far not clearly and consistently revealed themselves in the data on feelings, facial and vocal behaviors, peripheral nervous system responses, and instrumental behaviors. The jury is still out on whether there are distinct brain markers for each emotion, but so far the available evidence does not encourage a natural-kind view. An individual study here or there might produce evidence to distinguish between two or more emotions, but inconsistency in findings across studies is thus far the norm, and the specificity of correspondences between emotions and brain locations has not been adequately addressed. — Barrett - Are Emotions Natural Kinds?