If this is the case, then how do we show how a conscious goal "acts" as a final cause to produce a chain of efficient causes (habitual action)? — Metaphysician Undercover

Attending releases the appropriate habits, while suppresing the inappropriate ones.

so the bridge between final cause and efficient cause would be found in the relationship between anticipation and habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

In broad way that is so. But habit is also final cause/constraint that has got baked in over a long period of learning. So the contrast is in an efficient division of labour in a time-pressured world. Habits represent finality that has been learnt to the point it is baked-in intentionality. Attention is then the finality we have to construct specifically to deal with the current moment in time.

It is confusing, I agree. But in terms of forming intentions, attention is much slower than habit because habit has already accumulated intentionality over a lifetime of learning. And attention is also much slower at executing in terms of efficient cause actions as again it is dealing with novelty and must spend time deliberating on the sequence of steps that might make some plan.

If I have to go to the bank and the shops, I can decide which to do first. But it might take a few seconds to work that out. Or if instead it is a learnt routine, I find my feet just making that choice for me. I am turning left rather than right before I've even had time to think at the road junction.

So both attention and habit are separable systems. And being systems, each requires the same structure - finality and efficient cause in interaction. Or constraints vs degrees of freedom.

Yet then in a broader sense, they are an integrated in themselves - each a specialisation of brain function in the two directions of economical habit vs effortful attention. One then seems to be all about the component actions, the other about the broad plan.

Anticipation of the shot, which produces preparedness, is just as important as habit, if not more so. — Metaphysician Undercover

I thought I said that. Sprinters must really concentrate their attention so that nothing stands in the way of responding as fast as possible to the gun. They must suppress all possible distractions and maintain a vivid impression of the event that is expected. And it can be so vivid that you get false starts.

So attention creates states of focused sensory anticipation/motor intention. Everything that can be got ready is got ready - to lower the informational barrier and make the processing as fast as biologically possible.

I've been in more than one car accident, driving, where the scene unfolds very quickly, but I've always maintained conscious control over how I operated the controls of the vehicle until the end. — Metaphysician Undercover

Alternatively time slows. The fact that attentional level processing doesn't have time to make sense of what is going on leaves us with the feeling of the moment being stretched out and lasting an eternity.

And then you say you were in conscious control. Yet sports science will say the best that could be the case was that you were in the usual zone of responding out of trained habit, then afterwards there was a reportable working memory as attention fixed a record of the blur of events.

So it is your belief against the scientific evidence here.

Since attention is actually a habit, the better dichotomy would habit/anticipation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, relabel the same things anyway you like. It makes no difference. I just go with the standard labelling that has emerged in psychology and neuroscience.

My only quibble is that "anticipation" is useful for signalling another paradigm difference - the switch from "consciousness" as the output of a representation, to seeing it as about predictive modelling. It is anticipation that comes first. And then that acts as a selective filter on awareness which allows us to in fact ignore as much of the world as possible.

So yes, if habit is then understood in this light as what we can manage to ignore (because it is already predicted), then it is just the relabelling of the same functional dichotomy.

So attention really only gives to our minds what has occurred, the past. Now we need a principle, such as anticipation, whereby the fact that something is about to occur, is present to the mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I already said that "consciousness" involves both the half second before and the half second after. So the fact that attentional level processing is slow means that it is there in advance of the moment, and there afterwards mopping up. First it generates the prediction that allows most things to be ignored. Then it deals with what in turn couldn't be ignored. After that, we have a tidied up impression of the world that can be filed as reportable memory.

Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that without presupposing a bivalence of right and wrong? — Srap Tasmaner

It is scientific reasoning. So I guess bivalence might be replaced by the null hypothesis. We propose that X is a hypothetical cause of an observable. Then we presume the existence of measurement error. And so we compare X to the null hypothesis - the counterfactual that the observable is caused only by randomness in the system in question. There is always going to be false positives due to irreducible chance or indeterminism (in the world, or in our acts of measurement).

But bivalence is not wrong as a tool of inquiry. We can't test anything unless we frame the alternatives crisply. We have to formalise a claim in terms of a definite yes or no question.

However then, we should recognise this is a necessary quality of our epistemic tool and not of the world. The world itself could be vague foundationally. So bivalence is simply a way of formalising a definite hypothesis. And (following Robert Rosen) our acts of measurement are then the informal part of the business. What counts as an acceptable degree of measurement becomes bound up by the purposes we might have in mounting an enquiry after truth, and so how easily we might feel satisfied. It is tacit knowledge - what counts as good enough - that AP theories of truth don't really appear to recognise.

Scientific reasoning instead actually does pay close attention to the business of making measurements. It has well developed probability theory (which Peirce pioneered) to make measurement as "formalised" as possible, despite the fact that a hypothesis is forever going to be a guess that suggests its own "sign" or answering measurement.

Guesses embed their preconceptions in a way that can't ultimately be avoided. So pragmatism would be about controlling the consequences of that situation.

So when it comes to bivalence, note that Peirce was explicit on how to handle it as part of his work on logic.

Vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply. Ultimately crisp bivalence fails as states of affairs are simply vague or indeterminate.

And then generality is that to which the law of the excluded middle fails to apply. Again, ultimately bivalence ceases to make sense once there is no longer any particularity to speak of.

So bivalence is great and effective in positing a world of crisp particulars - a state of affairs in which things are are the case, or are not the case. And that metaphysics can take us almost everywhere we seem to what to go. We don't have to worry about the limits of knowledge as so much can be logically inquired into using this tool.

But once we get down to theories of truth, we are talking about the limits of a bivalent framing. And Peirce says flip it around. Accept that fundamentally things will be vague. Uncertainty rules at ground level - and it doesn't matter because our own purposes place epistemic limits on how much we even could care. Let's not pretend to worry about things that don't in practice worry us.

Unknowability just doesn't look like a big deal in this context. People act on what they believe to be true, or even believe to be probable, and either is rational. You could even know, for a fact, that a proposition has arbitrarily high probability of being true without knowing that it is true; that's surely rational grounds to act on. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism would flip this on its head by saying everything is probabilistic. Reality is not deterministic - in the fashion conventional thinking about true facts or states of affairs presumes - but is instead only a constraint on indeterminism.

That means there is an element of chance or creativity in every act of "verification". We can frame a proposition as a deterministic choice - the principle of bivalence - yet then the measurement process itself can only be informal in the end, as on the fine-grain, nature can still fool us, as Gettier cases illustrate.

So the job of proposition verification is not to establish deterministic certainty - that is impossible. But what we can demonstrate transparently is a reduction in uncertainty. We can aim to reduce indeterminism to the level of what we deem mere probabilistic noise.

In asserting a truth, it is a practical fact that there is a level of error that matters (because we are asserting with some purpose in mind) and then a level of error where we are no longer bothered any more, so it makes no difference whether the facts are either "true" or "false". Or determinate vs random.

Take the height of Mt Everest. As a mountain climber, it doesn't really matter if it is X metres high, give or take another minute or two of climbing. At some level of truth-telling, our interest fuzzes out. The pull of the moon might have some measurable effect on Mt Everest so its "true height" changes by nanometres constantly all day. But this becomes noise - unless we establish some purpose that makes a more exact measurement seem reasonable.

And then doing that is probably going to change the very assertion anyway. I may have to concede Mt Everest doesn't "have a height" in the simple fashioned sense I was trying to posit. At the nanometre scale, it all becomes relative or vague as reality doesn't come with that kind of fixed measurement baseline.

So the point is that AP agonises about truth because it embeds a certain metaphysics. Pragmatism rebuilt theories of truth by advancing a quite different metaphysics. One worries about arriving at certainty. The other concerns itself with the regulation of uncertainty. Pragmatism accepts verification is a practical affair closely tied to interests. So that justifies acts of verification petering out in vagueness or noise - whether or not that is due to ontic or epistemic reasons.

It could be that we just don't care beyond a certain level of fine-grain detail. Or it might be that there just isn't any fine-grain detail to be had - as quantum indeterminism suggests. Either way, pragmatism works.

James was a good psychologist but a weak philosopher. The holes in his version of pragmatism were obvious. Peirce felt forced in the end to rebrand his pragmatism as pragmaticism because of that.

As Misak says:

The question of how Ramsey became an advocate of pragmatism is a fascinating piece of intellectual biography. He was as unhappy as Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein with William
James’s suggestion in his 1907 book Pragmatism:

Any idea upon which we can ride . . . any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor, is . . . true instrumentally. . . . Satisfactorily . . . means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic. (James 1975, 34–35)2

It was Peirce’s more sophisticated pragmatism that influenced Ramsey

The question, then, is why a neutral "naturalistic" description is desirable, or why a neutral description is seen as superior to a description with normative undertones. Is it purely on the basis of scientific "objectivity", or is it also perhaps a psychological defense mechanism of sorts? Is it not easier to "deal" with an apparently savage reality by construing it as blind, purposeless, unintentional and amoral? — darthbarracuda

Scientific objectivity is a bit more than "construing". It is the evidence based approach. And it is metaphysically systematic in assigning causality. If you ask a question, it splits things into immediate and distant causes. It has a hierarchical approach to explanation.

So you suggest that science would merely neutralise our feelings here. Somehow your belief in "savage reality" can be presumed to be correct - because you feel that way - and any other view, no matter how differently founded on a system of reason and evidence, must be an ego defence mechanism.

Sure, it is possible to use selective facts to explain away something unpleasant. But the argument is that you (and your cite) are employing selective facts to make that unpleasant case in the first place. You are referencing observations like female diving beetles burying themselves in the mud. So it becomes rather contradictory to both cite science and decry science in bolstering a position.

My argument is that a naturalistic approach would put rape in its full objective context. Being "scientific" here means already being alert to the probability that causality is complex - a hierarchy that runs from general constraints to particular triggers. So that is metaphysically normative - a way we all ought to handle important questions. And that is an established norm your essay fails.

And then your characterisation of "scientific reality" as "blind, purposeless, unintentional and amoral" is also a view that biology - the science of life and mind - would challenge. Sure, that is a view that became socially popular following Newtonian mechanics. But plenty of my friends in theoretical biology see purpose and intentionality - some grade of telos - even in the laws of thermodynamics. It is not impossible that the facts should cause a revision of a now 500 year old view of nature as a blind machine.

Then don't forget that my actual reply was not that nature is neutral. I said a biological/sociological view would be that what is natural is a dichotomy of competition vs cooperation. With a balance that is then "fit" in terms of long-run survival. So for example, one expects both a general species-typical reproductive strategy and also localised opportunistic cheating. Each pole of action is equally necessary and natural. You have to have constraints. You have to have degrees of freedom. The evolutionary judgement is then on the balance of these contrasting impulses across a time horizon. Does the overall dynamic work in an adaptive sense?

So you are adopting a catastrophising metaphysics were things are either right or wrong. If rape is wrong, then rapish looking behaviour is just as wrong. And in the end, anything in the remotest construable as rapey is wrong. There just is no smallest degree of rape that isn't wrong because you have no demarcation line where rapey behaviour becomes either instead a positive - as in a shift from globally cooperative reproductive strategies to locally competitive reproductive strategies. Or indeed, it just becomes background noise - so insignificant that it doesn't count as action of either kind.

And again, I also question the way you frame rape as an issue of biological reproductive strategy. Making babies never seems the point. At most, you could point to sexual gratification - a desire to copulate which is biology's way of making babies without you, the male, having much say. So yes, there is an element of causality there. But then scientifically you would want to put that in the context of all the evidence. Don't men also have an instinct to father, nurture and protect? And doesn't actual rape have more to do with biological strategies of submission and dominance? Humiliation rather than breeding may be the prime cause to analyse. And so - if you are being a radical feminist pretending to present a biological case - you would look to what nature says about dominance~submission as evolved behaviour.

There is a lot to say about how to think about these issues properly. But it is clear that the essay just doesn't.

The position presented in the essays is that we can't absolve patriarchal problems within the patriarchy itself. It's radical feminism. Fixing these issues can only happen if the patriarchy itself is dismantled. And in this case the patriarchy is traced back in time through millennia of biological evolution. Rape, battery, violence, etc can not be solved though conventional means but only through the eradication of the patriarchy (which is oftentimes theorized to be connected to capitalism and religion). — darthbarracuda

Again, there are two stories here. Either it is the case that A is good, B is bad - a simple-minded monochrome tale of causality - or it is the case that A and B are the necessary complementary extremes of being that are the foundation of a complex adaptive balancing act.

So perhaps patriarchy and feminism are two poles of a fruitful social order? It is only the balance that is at issue as "the West" transitions from an agricultural social economy to a techno-democratic one?

You are suggesting that there is no end to guilt because no lines can be drawn on history. Yesterday's ways have to be either right or wrong. They can't just be different. This is catastrophising. And it leaves you unable to analyse as you are not accepting the metaphysical principle that reality is irreducibly complex. It always takes two to tango.

It's hard for me to imagine a male with a vagina that is actually a male. Male-ness seems to be inherently tied to the capacity to penetrate, flood, neutralize and dominate. — darthbarracuda

You have an image and can't get beyond it. But is that inflexibility of thought reasonable?

Yep. See https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/download/2946/2607

As Schop says, a general reply is that nature is a balance of competition and co-operation. So rather than reducing the issue to a debate where cooperation = good vs competition = bad, the informed question is what is the appropriate balance, and is that being met?

Also, humans are different from animals in having another evolutionary level of behaviour - the sociocultural level brought about by having speech to structure our biological relations. That raises the question of whether a social construct like "rape" can really apply in a strictly biological setting. It may. But that is still a part of the argument that needs to be made properly. Can an animal be immoral or have evil intentions?

Males might not be "intrinsically rapists" as the essays annoyingly imply, but I don't think it's implausible to say males' physiology evolved as to maximize the chances of spreading genes, which oftentimes means rape. — darthbarracuda

In a general sense, male animals would seem to have an interest in spreading their genes. But biology also sees that there are two possible strategies - r vs K.

In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring. The focus upon either increased quantity of offspring at the expense of individual parental investment of r-strategists, or reduced quantity of offspring with a corresponding increased parental investment of K-strategists, varies widely, seemingly to promote success in particular environments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

So either males and females can spread their seed to the winds, or they can focus on fewer offspring more likely to survive. And note this is a cooperative story as it is a reproductive choice being made at the species level.

Of course you might then see a secondary competitive story within this general species strategy. It might be in the interests of males - or females - to game the system to their personal advantage.

If the reproductive strategy is based on quality - parental investment - then wouldn't you expect the selective pressure to be on just that? And while cheaters would exist, there would be selective pressure to prevent it?

Humans of course, more than any other species, rely on heavy parental investment. Or rather, communal investment - it takes a village, etc. And social structures have developed to support that. The prediction would be that "rape" would be rare in a stable, well-balanced, social situation. Or rather, that rape would be construed differently. So socially accepted if a child resulted and the man was forced to marry and support the girl, for instance in Olde Englande.

I am not defending any particular behaviour. I'm just answering in terms of evolutionary logic. Rape becomes a definite thing in modern culture because that culture so clearly makes a violent ignoring of consent a big issue. We want a world where nothing is done to us against our wishes. It is a general mindset that applies to both sexes. And as a cultural mindset, it is also either going to prove adaptive or not in the longer run. A naturalistic view doesn't presume that there is some moral absolute position here.

So in general, all this talk about biological parasites, sexual violence and rape as a reproductive strategy is too obviously over-wrought to be taken seriously as actual biological hypotheses. Rape is obviously a social and cultural problem. If you want to fix it, turning it into a cod evolutionary debate is hardly sensible.

Do you think people rape people because their aim is making babies? It is not to do with sexual gratification? Or more probably, power and humiliation?

Turn it around. Imagine women had a dick, men had a hole. But men - or a subset with social issues - still had a rage to humiliate. Would the shape of the biological equipment make a difference?

What we are looking for here is the motivation to get something done, and this is prior to any such a division. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are forgetting that my approach is quite different from yours on this. Again, you want to boil things down to the effective causes of behaviour. And that leaves out the complementary role played by the final causes.

So should "motivation" be entirely a question of "what local thing triggered this action"? Or is motivation a big enough concept that it includes "what global goal gave form to action itself"?

I of course defend the latter.

So the motivating factor is to be found within these internal parts, rather than within the conscious mind. But to motivate the will power, is the closest thing we have to motivation without activating habits, because the will power to refrain from action is to deny the action of habits as far as possible. So it is the motivation behind will power, what motivates willpower, which is the motivation to resist activity, that we will find the purest form of the motivating factor. — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't this another way of saying that attentional level processes can constrain our habits in fruitful fashion? I will respond out of learnt habit unless I take time to watch what I am doing and impose some kind of working memory/prefrontal plan on things?

Again we are back to a division of labour. I want to be able to do as much as possible without having to think about it. But I also want to be able to stop and think about anything that needs a non-habitual response.

So back to the power of a functional dichotomy. Two styles of processing are better than one. I want to be in control when it matters. I also like an easy life where I can let routine stuff take care of itself. Most of the time, this itself feels like a seamless and automatic habit. The two ways of processing the world are so smoothly integrated that I don't need to pay attention to any join.

But in high pressure, fast moving, situations - like playing sport - the fact that the processes are quite different in things like temporal scale can really show.

There is not enough time to consciously plan the throwing of a pass. There often isn't even the time to do the quicker thing of simply halting a subconsciously unfolding action plan. Free won't is faster than freewill. Yet even then, we find ourselves often thinking oh shit, shouldn't have done that, as the body is already launching into action.

So you are stuck on the usual reductionist regress of trying to find "the self" that wills the body to act. If I flex my little finger voluntarily, it seems that I must of commanded it, because it just happened. And yet I can't actually find any thought or effort that "I" delivered at that precise moment to make the finger move. It just as much felt as if it moved by itself. Because it suddenly felt like it.

As long as you are focused on finding a trail of effective causes, an organ like the brain is going to be a mystery. But ahead of time I can decide - at an attentional level - to form a state of constraint that regulates my little finger. I can say the general goal is to flex in the next few moments. Go as soon as you like and I won't stop you. I have a clear mental expectation of what should happen, and what should not happen - like I don't want the little finger of my other hand to do the flexing. So I have restricted my habits of finger moving in a very specific and attentional fashion. Pretty much the only thing the habit level brain can do is move in the way expected. So for all its varied propensity, the probability approaches 1 that it will emit the response that has been attentionally anticipated.

It is a different way of making things happen. Organic rather mechanistic.

The body's habits are a whole collection of potential routines or degrees of freedom. I could break into a moonwalk at any instant. It is just one of umpteen learn possibilities. Then attention does the other thing of restraining the space of possible actions until only the one desired action becomes the probable outcome. I form the goal of moonwalking and the whole of the brain becomes motivated in that behavioural direction as every other option has been momentarily suppressed.

Attention is a habit acquired in an evolutionary sense. The brain evolved that propensity in that it is baked into the inherited neural architecture of higher animals.

But also, that evolved brain architecture favoured the division of labour that I've mentioned - attentional level processing for dealing with novelty, habit level processing for dealing with the routine. So what was acquired as large brains developed through evolutionary learning was a strong dichotomisation of what we would call habits and attention. The taking of habits also evolved.

So sure, we can step back and take the really long-term perspective, and this is what we see. The cerebellum and basal ganglia are also particularly large in humans.

Thus if we are talking about the functional architecture of brains as it is actually divided, you are talking out your hat as usual. You are thinking like a reductionist in wanting to reduce two things to one thing. But an organicist can see that a division into two things is how you can arrive at the functional harmony or synthesis of an effective division of labour. Study brain science and you will discover that it is all about this principle of complementary logic.

I'll throw in another reference for you - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complementary-nature

Habit is a learnt propensity. Attention is how you learn a propensity. It ain't difficult.

No words. You are saying the Dutch can't be a tall as a national characteristic because some happen to be short? You just reject ordinary statistical concepts?

Sure. You mean like Pragmatist philosophy of mind? Or do you mean to reference some other philosophical position? Give me a link so I can get an idea of what philosophy you have been studying.

In the meantime...

Although James plays down attention's role in complex perceptual phenomena, he does assign attention to an important explanatory role in the production of behaviour. He claims, for example, that ‘Volition is nothing but attention’ (424).....

James's somewhat deflationary approach to attention's explanatory remit means that, when it comes to giving an account of the ‘intimate nature of the attention process’, James can identify two fairly simple processes which, he claims, ‘probably coexist in all our concrete attentive acts’. and which ‘possibly form in combination a complete reply’ to the question of attention's ‘intimate nature’ (1890, 411).

The processes that James identifies are:
The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs, and
The anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centres concerned with the object to which attention is paid. (411)....

Here, as in his more frequently discussed treatment of emotion, it is distinctive of James's approach that he tries to account for a large-scale personal-level psychological phenomenon in a realist but somewhat revisionary way, so as to be able to give his account using relatively simple and unmysterious explanatory resources. An alternative deflationary approach—one which James explicitly contrasted with his own—is the approach taken in 1886 by F.H. Bradley.....

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/#WilJamHisConDefThe

Alright, I'll try to piece something together. — praxis

Cool.

Yeah sure. That's totally believable.

But I am asking you directly to make it clear what you might think be our essential point of difference in this thread. Time to put up or shut up.

It was a simple question and you don't seem to want to answer.

Why don't you just come out and explain what is bugging you so much. I mean in terms of the philosophical positions being taken. Your personal neuroses count for nothing. But I am asking you directly what argument you mean to defend here - or pick a fight about.

So are you agreeing with creative's argument? Or is that what you are labelling a satire. :)

Creative says we can't extract traits from population samples. Which would be news to most folk. Is that a position you also mean to defend here?

You seem upset about something.

Because of dissatisfaction. No matter how complex a behavior, it comes down to that. — schopenhauer1

Alternatively, action can be motivated by either a desire to move away from something or a desire to move towards something.

In operant conditioning, this is shown by the fact that removing a negative reinforcer can strengthen a behaviour, and providing a positive reinforcer can also strengthen a behaviour.

So the complexity of behaviour would in fact be reduced to the dichotomy of pleasure and pain. Everything is not merely an escape anymore that one would argue everything was an approach. The positive and the negative are both motivators.

But you do not seem to recognize attention as a habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's probably a habit I picked up from studying psychology/neuroscience.

The purported list of bullet points heretofore does not accomplish the aforementioned task, and thus does not have the justificatory ground to warrant it's assertion, let alone assent to the belief that it is true. — creativesoul

Sounding like a drunk lawyer here. Is it a joke?

Yes, I believe anticipation is the critical thing here. This may be what bridges the gap between conscious intent and habitual performance, forming the basis for motivation. The intent must be left as general, in order that it adapts to the rapidly changing environment, while maintaining the very same goal. The individual is motivated toward a general intent (winning the game), allowing that there is a massive number of possible means to this end. As the situation unfolds, the appropriate means to this end (habits) are constantly being decided upon. These decisions are based on anticipation and the desire to avoid negative results in favor of the positive. — Metaphysician Undercover

So attention forms an intent as a general constraint? It doesn't matter how that intent is satisfied in terms of particular connecting actions?

Isn't that what I said over the course of many threads?

The logic remains. Nerve signals take time. Habits short circuit action decisions and have an integration time of a tenth to a fifth of a second. Attentive level thought takes a third to three-quarters of a second to arrive at an integrated state. So in sport or any skilled activity, decisions on how to complete an intent - as in thinking "go" with a throw - have to be left to a trained habit level of execution.

And on anticipation, of course anticipation is absolutely necessary. The brain is a prediction engine. But the same story applies. We learn how to predict at an slow attentive level. Then we get good and familiar with this predicting such that is can be executed as rapid habit. Both levels of processing are anticipatory. But one has to start out and form a general intent ahead of time - prime for the decision by setting up some notion of the constraining goal. Then the other can kick in and supply the particular action commands right up to the last split instant - which is still a good tenth of a second behind the world, and so also is by necessity anticipatory.

The quarterback must release with millisecond accuracy and yet it takes at least a tenth of a second for any "go now" command to form as connections in the brain and messages travelling down the arms and body. So forget about even longer attentional, voluntary, deliberative, reportable consciousness being in control.

Even habit level execution takes a tenth of a second to make the simplest decision, like hear the pistol shot that starts the race. And to react to something more complex, like a bad bounce of a cricket ball, takes a fifth of a second.

This is all very well studied in sports psychology labs. It is even written into the laws of the games, as in the thresholds set for false starts in sprint races.

It should be obvious really. The more complicated the processing, the longer it is going to take. So habit is learnt skill that makes the least demand. Attention is a whole brain analysis that just has to take more time.

Yes, skilled competitors are good at throwing in unpredictability. And coping with unpredictably. That is what happens when you put in enough practice of the right kind. Tricky things can be handled "instinctively".

Again, we are talking about organisms and not machines. Simple is not dumb. Simple is proof of having learnt. Simple is the mastery of efficient achievement of goals.

I think it is a mistake to represent the goal as driving you forward, because the goal does not drive you forward, it may just sit there in your mind. It is your dedication to achieving the goal, and the will to act, which drives you forward, not the goal itself. The goal itself is a passive thing with no causal power. — Metaphysician Undercover

Goals are not passive things. They are active states of constraint. So they may not be efficient causes, but they are final causes. They shape the intentional space in which consequent decision making unfolds. If we have an image of the final destination, then that is how we can start filling in all the necessary step actions to get us there.

So let's take your example of throwing the ball. Suppose you're a quarterback, and the throw must be precisely timed. You hold the goal, to throw, and you hold the ball, to throw. At the exact right moment, you must pull back and release the ball. The motivating factor for the release is not the goal, because despite having the goal of throwing you continue to hold the ball, perhaps even to the point of getting sacked. The motivating factor appears to be the judgement "now", at which time the habit takes over and the throw is made. — Metaphysician Undercover

When playing fast sport, the decision-making has to be all pretty much habitual or automatic. Habitual responses are learnt behaviour - reactions ready to go - so can be executed in around a fifth of a second. Attention-level deliberation takes half a second at least. So it is much too slow to actually be in control while playing football.

The proper role of attentional-level goal forming is in the breaks in play. The "wait and get ready with a plan" moments. That is where the quarterback delays to become clear on his general intention during the next play. He has to start with a state of broad focus which shuts out everything he can expect to be able to ignore - like the cheerleaders prancing on the sidelines - so that his trained habits will be able to pick out all the rapid subtleties, like last instant reshuffles in the opposition defensive line.

Then the play starts to unfold and all his trained instincts can slot in according to a general intent. He is itching to pull the trigger on the throw. A conjunction of observed motions on the field hit the point where the habits themselves provide the timing information. The "go now" command is issued by the mid-brain basal ganglia in concert with the brainstem's cerebellum. The conscious brain can discover how it worked out a half second later as attentional-level processing catches up to provide a newly integrated state of experience. The quarterback can start thinking oh shit, or hot damn.

So the mistake is to try to assign thought, cause, motivation or intention to just one level of mental operation. And yet also, the general desire - neurobiologically speaking - is for a strong dichotomy to emerge.

Attention wants to do the least it can get away with. Everything that can be handed down the chain to learnt automatism will be handed down. But then that also leaves attention responsible for the very stuff that is the most critical or difficult or novel when it comes to "thought, cause, motivation or intention".

So a kid learning to play really does have to focus on the mechanics of simply timing a throw. There is no remaining capacity for thinking about the patterns of play likely to be unfolding on the field. But as a skilled player, even reading the game is something that doesn't need specific attention. Most of the effort has to go to just not getting distracted by cheerleaders, or whatever.

Motivation is thus dichotomous. It has both its generality and its particularity - the two levels complementing each other. You have to be governed by the constraint of some generalised intent. And then within that, you will be able to see all the particular steps needed to get you to that destination.

Action is not about summoning up the energy to do the bidding of reason. That is a mechanical metaphor - the psychology inspired by the industrial age when hot steam was needed to make the wheels turn.

Instead, a biological organism is always some host of spastic potential, itching and twitching, restless to be doing. Just watch a newborn squirming randomly. What it then needs is the focus so all that potential gets a clear direction that is useful. And over time, that intentionality has to become transformed into stable, reliable, habit. The ultimate goal is an economy of motion - achieving the most by doing the least.

Rather than motivation being about feeding the machine with more energy to get it to go harder, it is about learning how to reduce the informational load on acting so that doing what you need to do feels like an easy downhill ride - the flow experience of the truly skilled individual.

Who needs motivation to climb stairs or drive a car? Once the habits have been learnt, these dangerous and complex actions could not feel easier. We just get on and do them without having to break down any informational barriers.

Of course then there is real life where as soon as we have mastered the basic skills, higher level decision making gets piled on top. We even seek greater demands as unthinking and repetitive action gets boring. There are always new horizons to automate and assimilate to habit.

So when people complain about a lack of motivation to study, exercise, tidy their bedroom, whatever, it is because they face informational barriers - conflicted intentions - that make going in that direction too hard. They are really faced with the choice of either actually learning the appropriate life routines, or dealing with the possibility that its not actually something they believe in as a globally constraining life goal.

Like for example a culture that one might say is 'fear based', as opposed to a culture that has more of a compassionate style? — praxis

Yep. It is pretty obvious that there are many cultural styles around the world. There are crib sheets for business travellers to help them understand the cultures they might want to engage with. So differences can be boiled down to a bullet point list of social values like...

New Zealand: ingenious, fair, restrained, modest, earthy and informal.
USA: self-reliance, speed, control, equality, speaking up, law and order, and capitalism.
China: face, family, relationships, hierarchy, prosperity, harmony and nationalism.
Switzerland: follow the plan, slow but sure, Swiss-made, consensus and order.

So there is an emotional style that speaks to a set of shared values and serves as the expected way to behave. If you can't show these virtues in your "feelings" - in the way you feel you want to act - then you can expect social consequences meant to correct that state of affairs.

In the US, you've got to speak up. In China, you've got to pipe down. As the general rule. And you can see how each emotional style relates to a social history. The qualities that best suit a pioneer settler community would be quite different from those that help perpetuate a feudal agrarian society.

I believe it could be, but it's not my understanding that emotion concepts are deliberately or consciously taught. — praxis

It is you who introduced these further distinctions of "deliberate" and "conscious". Why do you think they are necessary qualifications?

If you're suggesting that societies intentionally and purposefully teach these concepts, what is the purpose in doing so? — praxis

As I've said, the purpose is adaptive. It is the way societies create the kind of self-regulating individuals that can then perpetuate that particular collective social style.

Really, you seem to be doing your best not to understand. You said you were enthusiastic about the constructivist point of view, and yet you don't appear to get the first thing about it.

You just seem very hostile. If you want to understand something, try to pin-point the difficulty you are having a little more crisply. Put your emotions aside.

If you accept emotion is constructed, then the question is constructed by who? The individual might eventually learn to construct the experience for themselves, but only after being suitably taught. Who does the teaching and so whose purposes are being ultimately expressed? Society. Culture. The community that ultimately owns the language.

So what's not to get?

I don't know what to make of your phrasing it this way, that emotion language is how we make sense of what is going on in a socially accepted fashion — praxis

Unconvincing. What's not to get about her examples of Tahitian sadness or learning how to know the feeling labeled schadenfreude?

Well, my memory of Cowie's stuff is he too was grappling with a similar distinction. — mcdoodle

In this review paper, it only gets a quick mention at the end. So I didn't get the impression he was grappling with it.

In contrast to evolutionists, social constructivists emphasise the role of culture
in giving emotions their meaning and coherence (e.g. Averill, 1980; Harre, 1986).

Emotion: Concepts and Definitions, Roddy Cowie, Naomi Sussman, and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, 2011

Lisa Feldman Barrett — praxis

Thanks for that. Were you thinking she was saying something different to me?

I like the way she puts it in this interview - https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/10/15245690/how-emotions-are-made-neuroscience-lisa-feldman-barrett

Your brain is always regulating and it’s always predicting what the sensations from your body are to try to figure out how much energy to expend. When those sensations are very intense, we typically use emotion concepts to make sense of those sensory inputs. We construct emotions.

So she says biologically there are bodily sensations - what it feels like to be aroused or otherwise moved physiologically in preparation for anticipated action. And then emotion language is how we make sense of what is going on in a socially accepted fashion.

When you known an emotion concept, you can feel that emotion. In our culture we have “sadness,” in Tahitian culture they don’t have that. Instead they have a word whose closest translation would be “the kind of fatigue you feel when you have the flu.” It’s not the equivalent of sadness, that’s what they feel in situations where we would feel sad.

Here’s an example: you probably had experienced schadenfreude without knowing the word, but your brain would have to work really hard to construct those concepts and make those emotions. You would take a long time to describe it. But if you know the word, if you hear the word often, then it becomes much more automatic, just like driving a car. It gets triggered more easily and you can feel it more easily. And in fact that’s how schadenfreude feels to most Americans because they have a word they’ve used a lot. It can be conjured up very quickly.

Learning new emotions words is good because you can learn to feel more subtle emotions, and that makes you better at regulating your emotions. For example, you can learn to distinguish between distress and discomfort.

So are we pretending now that these citations exist?

If you want to be taken seriously - which is what you say - then my reply is still that you have to supply references that can give context to your claims. You are making no sense to me because you are essentially speaking your own private language. Until you can point to something outside your bubble, who can really know what you are on about.

According to the theory of constructed emotion... — praxis

Whose theory is this exactly? I remember you were reading some book but can't recall the author.

Using the emoticon is literally signifying that he felt something. — praxis

And you think he literally felt smug hilarity? You don't think the emoticon represented what he hoped I would think he felt, rather than what he actually felt?

So sure, he obviously felt something. And he also just as obviously reached for the standard social mask.

No harm in that. But it illustrates my argument.

The gist of creativesoul's comments, as I interpret them, is an argument against the notion that 'emotions are a sense like sight and hearing'. For some reason you didn't see this, — praxis

Alternatively, I asked him for references that might make sense of wherever he thinks he is coming from on this. I have never understood his own words.

Rather than a sense, from what I understand emotions are more like a filter for our senses, shaping and distorting our mental simulations according to its predictions and the immediate needs of our mind/body. — praxis

That too is as clear as mud when you try to parse it. Perhaps you can expand, or copy and paste some of this constructed emotion theory you have in mind?

Yeah. A random dude on the internet who makes shit up is always going to trump the experts. Happens all the time.

If you can't place your arguments within any wider context of scholarship, then it just ain't scholarly.

What people say at the other end of life, on their death bed, should be a pretty sound guide.

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

Bald unsubstantiated assertions...

What are those?

Really really bald ones? — creativesoul

Not just unsubstantiated assertions, but bare-facedly so.

Anyway, it is amusing how you now seek to socially-frame this conversation with an emoticon response. You are telling me you felt nothing - "physiologically sensory perception" speaking. There was no heart rate acceleration, no defensive contraction of the pupils, no measurable sweating of the palms. You put on a smiling face to the world and that thought became the only detectable emotion inside your head.

Yeah, right. ;) And I would still appreciate you referencing your claims. Surely you have put some research effort into all this thought/belief jargon you've adopted?

No. You need it. If you are going to make these bald, unsubstantiated, assertions.

Physiological sensory perception is not caused by thought.
Emotion is caused by thought.
Emotion is not physiological sensory perception. — creativesoul

Citations?

The reason why these "higher emotions" aren't actual emotions would be due to the fact that there is no actual quality of emotions there. — TranscendedRealms

If I say I am in love, or I am being brave, there is always some affect - and even a lack of affect counts as an empty kind of feeling I could report.

So the issue for socially-constructed emotions is that they are bound by being a script. They are associated with a set of acceptable actions more than any single quality of feeling. They are complexes and not simplicities.

And this applies even to biological level emotionality. Does feeling scared vs feeling angry really feel much more than being in an adrenalised aroused state - just in one case you are primed for advancing, the other for retreating. So the experience is of that high arousal plus the behavioural direction that ensued.

Emotion theorists often say that the actual physiological "feelings" we can report are much simpler than we in fact think. Perhaps just those two dimensions of I am feeling aroused vs I am feeling relaxed, I am feeling pain vs I am feeling pleasure?

It is not our higher impulse that is the prominent guider in our lives. Rather, it is these "lower emotions" which guide the higher impulse since they are what make any endeavor that relies upon these higher impulses of good value to us in the first place. — TranscendedRealms

I don't want to dispute your personal experience, but the general theoretical response would be that the game does require us to be a player. We have to accept society makes us who we are - it becomes the cause of our grief, to the degree that it is not some biological issue. And so, it is also rational to take responsibility for manufacturing the social conditions under which we might best hope to flourish. As selves, we have to make it a two-way street.

And this indeed is the basic understanding that has emerged in modern positive psychology. It understands emotionality correctly as an internalisation of cultural mores that can then be disinterred and responded to rationally.

In therapy, a person might realise that they have been beating themselves up for years over the way their parents in particular might have framed their existence. "You need to be a man." "You have to win at life." "Oh you're the shy type." Discovering these are constructs that can be challenged or put sensibly into context means that the social expectations that shape an individual become individually negotiable. A new state of relations with the social world can be established.

Of course this doesn't make life perfectable. But then a belief in perfection (or nothing) is the reason why people set themselves up to fail. Or becomes the excuse for not even engaging in the business of the social co-creation of the individualised self.