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.

Yeah, there is a lot of nihilism, existentalism and ant-natalism expressed around these parts. It is a natural reaction to being asked to jump so high as a "self-actualising being" in the modern individualistic world.

So while you finger the rational side of the equation - Scientism - I see that as merely the other half of the same essential duo. It is the romantic belief in human transcendence that was also fixed by Plato right at the birth of the Socratic Western ideal of the self-made person answering to a call from beyond his or her actual (biologically and socially constrained) world.

That would be why the values of other cultures - like Buddhism - might appeal to you. They speak to a traditional, non-technological, lifestyle that perforce is more communal and ecological, less directed at growth and advance.

But what happens when Westerners start picking and choosing the bits they think they best like from other cultures? You start to get the new agers and transhumanists. You get a romanticised version of the Eastern wisdom where again it becomes all about personal ascendancy - tapping into spiritual power so as to become super-human.

In classical philosophy, emotions (or 'the passions') were something to be overcome. — Wayfarer

Plato's chariot allegory - a tripartite division of reason, higher moral feeling and base animal emotion would be the influential basis of the Western view.

Plato paints the picture of a Charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses...

The Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature (e.g., righteous indignation); while the other represents the soul's irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature. The Charioteer directs the entire chariot/soul, trying to stop the horses from going different ways, and to proceed towards enlightenment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_Allegory

I suppose this attitude conveys the impression of the proverbial Mr Spock - the cool rationalist, for whom emotion is a peculiar human trait, but who on that account misses something vital about being human. — Wayfarer

This is what I mean about the power of cultural imagery to teach appropriate attitudes. Mr Spock speaks for the cool reason of the Enlightenment. Capt Kirk speaks for the Romantic repost that humanity is ultimately defined by its heart.

Meanwhile the whole show teaches impressionable youngsters that the American Dream of individual freedom and free enterprise should be imposed on all alien cultures encountered. Even bug-eyed monsters should be given the supreme gift of human independently-minded feeling.

Oh the irony of the fact that it is social constraints that give shape to human freedoms, pointing us in a clear direction and leaving us to do our best to meet those goals.

Emotionality is a clay to be sculpted. And the goals are made so lofty, so abstract, they become unrealistic to achieve.

A good partner brings out the best in one's self.

I was particularly struck by work done by Roddy Cowie et al for the HUMAINE project — mcdoodle

I read one of his literature reviews and thought it presented a very confused picture. For me, nothing about emotion makes sense until you can clearly distinguish between a neurobiological level of evaluation - what all animal brains are set up to do - and the socially-constructed emotionality of humans, which is a cultural framing of experience.

The best source on social emotion was the group led by Oxford philosopher Rom Harre in the 1980s. It took the anthropological route of showing how different such constructs are across different cultures. And it tied in with the rediscovery of Vygotsky, the development of discursive psychology, at the same time. Harre did two good collections of essays.

So the two levels of emotionality have to be understood in separate ways.

The biological emotions are basic affective responses. The brain needs to be able to sense the body's physiological state - we are hungry, tired, etc - and also interpret the world in terms of its dangers, its rewards. It constantly needs to orientate in ways that match our physiology to the demands that are imminently expected. If we see a tiger, we need to start feeling the adrenaline that primes us for whatever decision we are going to take. That level of emotionality is simply what it feels like to be changing gear metabolically in a way that fits the particular challenge or opportunity of the moment.

Then the social emotions are not about our own metabolic/physiological needs but about socially appropriate behaviour.

There is also a biological basis as we are creatures highly evolved for social living. We naturally feel empathy or dominance or whatever. We can point to specific neurotransmitters and hormones, like oxytocin and testosterone, which subserve specific brain pathways.

But language means that feelings and ideas can be woven together as social scripts. We know how we are supposed to behave when we are being "in love", or "brave", or "ashamed". These "higher emotions", or Platonic passions, stand as cultural ideals we are meant to do our best to live up to. And how we act rather than how we truly feel is what really matters.

As I say, once you check the cross-cultural anthropological evidence, this becomes very obvious. But Western culture - with its particular stress on the rationality vs emotionality dichotomy - actually cuts across people's ability to believe it as a fact. The Western script - reaching its height of development through the dialectic of the Enlightenment and Romanticism - means that human emotionality can't be understood in simple pragmatic fashion as the learning of appropriate social habits. Reason and feeling must be dualistically divided, each somehow at war with the other for ownership of the individual psyche.

That is the irony. Much of the energy of even science or philosophy goes into perpetuating a Western cultural mythology. And that is why emotionality seems such a confused and self-contradictory subject. People think they know the answer - its reason vs feeling, rationality vs irrationality, stupid - and so bend all their arguments to steer to that outcome.

But also, it is a very successful social script, which is why it persists. By creating an exalted image of the individual human - always in a battle to conquer his/her base self by applying either higher reason, or higher feeling - then society is able to exert the maximum constraint on individual behaviour. We all become controlled by these learnt abstractions that are at the bottom of the West's creative, driving, growth-obsessed, mindset.

I'd refer you to the writings of Robert Rosen and other theoretical biologists like Howard Pattee. The whole idea of simulation falls apart when you consider biological reality.

The very point of a machine is that it is materially and energetically disconnected from the real world of dissipative relations. A computer just mindlessly shuffles strings of symbols. It becomes Turing universal once that physical disconnection is made explicit by giving the machine an infinite tape and infinite time. The only connection now is via the mind of some human who thinks some programme is a useful way of rearranging a bunch of signs and is willing to act as the interpreter. If the output of the machine is X, then I - the human - am going to want to do physical thing Y.

So one can imagine setting up a correspondence relation where every physical degree of freedom in the Universe is matched by some binary information bit stored on an infinite tape which can shuffle back and forth in infinite time. But clearly that is physically unrealistic. And also it misses the point that life and mind are all about there being a tight dynamical interaction between informational symbols and material actions.

There may be a divide between information and entropy. Yet there has to be also that actual connection where the information is regulating the entropy flow (and in complementary fashion, that flow is optimising the information which regulates it).

So until you are talking about this two-way street - this semiotic feedback loop - at the most fundamental level, then you are simply not capturing what is actually going on.

Reality is not a simulation and simulation cannot be reality. CTD makes empty claims in that regard. Formal cause can shape material reality, but it can't be that material reality.

I'm not asking you to prove something cannot happen. I'm asking you to demonstrate that what you claim has started to happen.

So - as is one of the defining differences between minds and machines - the argument is inductive rather than deductive. The degree of belief is predicated on a hypothesis seeming reasonable in that it is capable of being falsified. Has your claimed counterfactual - AI is simulating the essence of mindful action - come into sight yet?

I don't think this is necessarily something that can be understood in terms of the 'entropification principle'. I prefer a teleological attitude - that we're something the Universe enjoys doing. — Wayfarer

Sure. But if there is something like a 140 orders of magnitude difference between the amount of "dumb entropification" and the amount of "smart entropification" achieved by humans, then the Universe either is horribly bad at achieving its ends or it enjoys something else more.

Just a little bit of quantitative fact checking there.

Of course, the Singulatarians claim AI will spread intelligence across the Universe in machine form. It comes from the same place as interstellar panspermia.

But again it is not hard to do the entropic sums on that. There are no perpetual motion machines. And indeed, it is not possible even to get close to that level of thermodynamic efficiency, no matter how clever the intelligent design.

Because I don't see what you say or have referenced as being proof that stuff like simulating the human brain as being impossible. — Posty McPostface

The burden is really on you - as the AI proponent - to show that your machine architecture is actually beginning to simulate anything the human brain is doing.

So what is it that "conscious brains" actually do in core terms? That is the model you have to be able to present and defend to demonstrate that your alleged technical progress is indeed properly connected to this particular claimed end.

Except for one point: when intelligence evolves (which is surely does) how come it discovers 'the law of the excluded middle'. That is not 'something that evolved'. — Wayfarer

Funnily enough, that is the very first thing nature must discover. Existence itself - speaking as an organicist - arises via dichotomous symmetry-breaking. That is how dissipative structure is understood - as the emergence of the dichotomy of "dumb" local entropy and the "smart" global organisation that can waste it.

So the laws of though recapitulate that basic world-creating mechanism. The LEM is final part of the intellectual apparatus that dissipates our uncertainty concerning possibility. We get fully organised logically when we boil things down to being definitely either/or (and hence, ultimately, both).

We can't just have made up the ways of thinking that have proved so unreasonably effective. The laws of thought are not arbitrary whims but an expression of the logic of existence itself.

That is what Peirceian pansemiotic metaphysics is all about, after all. The universe arises via a generalised growth of reasonableness. That sounds mystical until you see it is just talking about the logic of symmetry-breaking upon which our best physical theories are now founded.

There are two AI scenarios. AI will either replace humans or augment humans. And given the "technology" is fundamentally different - machines can never be alive - a symbiotic relationship is the sensible prediction.

Human consciousness is already a socially-augmented reality. We are creatures of a cultural super-organism. Language became stories, books, mathematics - a social machinery for constructing "enlightened individuals".

Technology simply takes that story to another level. Look what happened when exponential tech resulted in a smartphone that had a gazillion times more processing power than an 1970s mainframe. Our lives got taken by this new mad thing of social media.

Back in the 1970s, scientists could only imagine that such processing power would be used to solve the problems of humanity, not obsess about the Kardashians.

So sure as shit "AI" will transform things. But if you want to predict the future, you have to focus on the actual human story. We have to understand what we are about first. And that isn't just a story of "relentless intelligence and rationality".

[Spoiler: Here I would go off down the usual path of explaining how intelligence arises in nature as dissipative entropic organisation - an expression of the second law of thermodynamics. :)]

I'm curious, what are your thoughts on the global workspace theory stuff? — JupiterJess

I don't think it is wrong so much as just clunky. It is still stuck in essentially a representational/computational paradigm with its flaws.

But on the other hand - in the mid-1990s - I thought it also clearly the leader in terms of that approach. It got the neural basics right, like the two stage habit~attention distinction, and the contextual, or constraints-based, approach to processing.

I knew Baars, so we discussed this quite a bit. At the time, the debate for me was about how to reconceive brain function as self-organising dynamics instead of data-processing computation. Both paradigms appeared to have a lot of correctness, yet how could they be married? That was when I got into the emerging bio-semiotic approach in theoretical biology. Semiotics does marry the dynamical and computational views in the one idea of the sign relation.

So in summary, 20 years ago, the global workspace was a competent summary of the neurocognitive evidence. But the philosophy of mind issue of "what paradigm" was equally clearly not solved by that. It still awaits its semotic revolution. :)

Emotionality is nearly always a complex of more than one 'emotion': in grief I am angry, in despair I often keep hopeful, and so on. To place them on some binary scale feels trivial. — mcdoodle

There is a good reason why binaries make sense. To understand the world in the most computationally efficient fashion, you want to break it into sharp-edged black and white. So a dichotomy - like approach and avoidance, or relaxed and aroused - is a way to see the world in its complementary extremes. It gives two precisely opposed points of view. And that then provides the clarity within which a spectrum of graded response can occur. Once the bounds of possibility have been anchored crisply by black vs white, then in-between you can have with equal definiteness every possible shade of grey.

So a dichotomy is a general processing principle. It fixes a decisive direction on the world. Then having broken the world towards two contrasting extremes, the third thing of a spectrum of intermediate reactions becomes possible. A glass can't be half full or half empty until there is a glass that is either completely full or completely empty.

The question then for the study of emotionality would be what is the fewest such dichotomies that you could get away with in modelling the brain's architecture.

Again, a most basic one would seem to be the sympathetic vs parasympathetic response - wind down or crank up.

But then there is a whole hierarchy of further more specific breaks. If we are negatively aroused, this may manifest as demanding a sharp decision of whether to fight or run. And even the flight response is dichotomised in the neural wiring of animals. A further escape strategem is a choice of whether to run or freeze. If a tiger appears before you in the jungle glade, there are two "best" instinctive options that evolution has built into the brain.

So yes, there is plenty of evolved complexity when it comes to our emotional responses. But also there is a single logic to all brain processing. The first job in making sense of the world is to break it apart as thesis and antithesis - frame it clearly as a black and white choice. Impose a clear directionality that makes a choice actually meaningful. Doing one thing becomes definitely not doing its opposite. And in that way, the whole of what it would be possible to do becomes contained within the spectrum of positions thus created.

Complexity can then arise because having made a first most general black and white decision, a whole lot more more particular black and white decisions can be piled on top. Once the brain can decide to relax or crank up, it can decide whether to crank up in terms of approach or avoidance. And if the decision is avoid, that could be flight or freeze as a more particular black and white choice.

As you say, when you get to the level of really complex (and culturally informed) emotions - like despair - the dichotomy is contained within the very concept. If despair is defined as a lack of hope, then despair is always going to make you think of hope - its antithesis. You can't actually have one without the thought of the other. Whiteness is really the sublimated idea that blackness happens to be maximally absent.

Emotions are actually a sense like sight. They allow us to see the values that things and situations hold in our lives. — TranscendedRealms

I can agree with this as a starting point but then is emotion really also an action? Sure, having a feeling of positivity or negativity is a state we can experience. We can call it a sensation. But at a deeper level, it is an orientation response - a call to action. It speaks to the broad assessment of whether to approach or avoid. Positivity draws us towards, negativity repels.

So yes, the emotional brain is fully part of every moment of perception. We can't see anything without a basic feeling of evaluation - even if the feeling is a disinterested "meh".

But to define emotion as a sensory modality - one to tally along with sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell - seems a miscategorisation as it is instead a generalised approach~avoidance kind of decision-making that applies across all these particular sensory modes.

Then as we dig deeper into this "emotional faculty", we can see that it has more complex structure. As well as strong feelings of approach vs avoidance, it has a still more general decision to make of relaxed vs aroused. Does the self need to crank for big action - like approaching or avoiding? Or can the self relax and conserve energy because there is nothing to react to - a feeling which itself can be either positive or negative, depending on whether that lack of stimulus is a relief or a matter of boredom.

Anyway, this basic action decision - crank up vs wind down - is a dichotomy wired into the body's nervous system as the contrasting sympathetic vs parasympathetic pathways. It is very real as a distinction built into the nervous system's design.

So of course the emotions exist to evaluate the world. But they have to get news of that world through the senses, or perceptual paths. A tiger has to be seen or heard before an evaluation - positive or negative - can happen. So emotion is general in then making sense of a sensation - pointing us quickly to the right kind of action. It really has a foot in both the traditional camps.

If you check out evolutionary biologists like Nick Lane, there are much more sensible stories than this "unwanted over-powering" scenario of yours.

For instance, sex had to develop for life to become multicellular complex. It permitted the systematic recombination of genes that meant each gene was exposed to selective pressure individually. Selection could see and tune individual traits rather than having to judge a complex organism on its whole genome. The good didn't have to be thrown away with the bad.

This was such an advantage it easily paid for the disadvantage of half the population not being breeders. And it was likely even an essential step to weed out actual parasites - introns - which would otherwise have infested DNA strands to the point of replicational extinction.

The asymmetry of egg vs sperm - the reason for two actual sexes - is an extension of this logic. It separated stemline variance (the egg with its essential metabolic kit) from germline variance (the sperm with its inactive DNA package). So the egg could preserve the essentials of the successful system of living while the sperm could become the freely disposable experiment.

The commonly taught idea is that sexual reproduction developed because it gave a greater amount of diversity to a gene pool, which in turn helps keep the species healthy by preventing unfit genes from replicating. This is probably at least part of the story... — darthbarracuda

Or the whole of the story, generally speaking...

But if you are talking about Homo sap specifically, what might appeal to your anti-natalism is the incredible violence foisted on the human female body by having to give birth to a monstrously brained infant through an inadequately designed bipedal birth canal.

Babies. There's your real parasites, eh?

You can control for the biases you believe to be there. And if you can control for the particular biases of some specific domain, then you can also control for bias in a general fashion when investigating the question of scientific bias itself.

So as is the general case with these kinds of self-referential paradoxes, you can break out of the apparent circularity by referencing hierarchy. Different levels of analysis - the general vs the particular - break apart the deductive loop to allow conclusions to be arrived at via inductive reasoning.

That means of course that you can't transcend the conditions for knowledge. You can't get outside the world you are trying to organise and so prove absolutely some claim - like that you have correctly removed all possible observer biases in your attempt to demonstrate that observer bias is indeed a real thing.

But you can then quite straightforwardly demonstrate that you have minimised your uncertainty about this being true. If you frame a general theory - the hypothesis that observer bias exists in science - you can then check the degree to which that prediction measures as true. A theory that is general enough should even predict the biases you will bring to the table when exploring this hypothesis.

So while you can't break out of the circle of explanation, you can show that the general and the particular - the theory and its tests - are becoming ever more definite. The more possibility the general rule about observer bias absorbs, the more unlikely it is that any of the particular forms of bias will escape notice.

Induction means accepting probabilities rather than demanding certainties. But in the end, that is how knowledge works. And science has developed a vast array of practical tools for dealing with observer bias - even if it is well known that it gets pretty relaxed about actually applying them much of the time.

Again I am gob-smacked that you simply repeat my own arguments back to me.

The only difference is that I emphasise the complementary logic involved. The brain has an obvious interest in doing as much at an automatic learnt level as possible, because by doing that, attentional level deliberation is by default reserved to deal with whatever else turns out to be unexpected, novel, or otherwise most significant about some passing moment.

And I've long been championing functional models - like Grossberg's ART neural nets, or Friston's Bayesian brain - which best make that point.

To the extent that the brain can make its environment predictable, it doesn't really have to pay attention to it. It already knows what is going on before it happens. The other side of that coin is then that when events start not meeting expectations, the brain knows to flip to the complementary form of analysis - the one we call attentional and deliberative. Rather than the smooth and skilled stereotype response, the higher brain can enter a creative and exploratory mode of thinking, remembering and learning. With the frontal planning areas and working memory engaged, the world can be kept in mind long enough to try stuff until some new understanding appears to have a good fit.

So it is an approach that accounts for the phenomenology pretty easily. It explains stuff like how we can hit tennis balls or drive cars when attentional processing is much too slow and much too tentative to account for such real world skill.

I don't know why you would start banging on about pre-conscious habit being "primitive". It should be clear enough that habit equates with accumulated wisdom. Attention and habit are two ends of the one dynamical process of coming to understand the world in useful fashion. So there is no evolutionary sequence here. Both had to arise together because each is formally the other's opposite as a style of processing.

But again, that is a point that is difficult to understand unless you are a Peircean or systems thinker.

Reductionists think that complexity builds hierarchically from the ground up. You have primitive unthinking creatures that are a bundle of reflexes. Then evolution keeps adding more intricate processing and suddenly out pops a self aware mind. It is the same computational paradigm that leads people to expect awareness to pop out as part of an information processing sequence that culminates in some final data display.

But natural philosophy understands hierarchical organisation to be triadic. Everything starts with a symmetry breaking that then progresses in two complementary directions. The two orthogonal poles of organisation that result - the local and the global - can then interact. You have a holistic system which self-organises.

So when it comes to brains, or simpler nervous systems, you can't talk about which came first - attention or habit. They have to arise together as a way of mutually breaking some vaguer state of uncertainty or indeterminacy.

A jumping spider has a brain the size of a poppy seed and yet it still has this same contrast between attentional and habitual processing. It can creep around the back of dangerous prey after it has paused long enough to assess the situation.

Now of course a jumping spider is not conscious like a cat let alone a child. But - if we define consciousness vs unconscious in terms of a functional contrast of processing strategies - then we can say it is also a conscious creature as we can stick electrodes in its head and observe the same fundamental attention vs habit distinction.

Our intuition that the consciousness of the jumping spider is hardly as good as ours is then also accounted for by the fact it has to pause and consider. It has to pounce rather than smoothly pursue. It is more robotic in that its levels of neural performance are not so integrated in "real time", nor are they integrated in a general fashion over scales of minutes, hours and days.

So definitely we can see a clear difference in scale - without having to claim an essential difference in kind.

But if we get down to a worm or a jellyfish, neither attentional-processing nor habit-forming exist except in the most neurally reduced form. You can demonstrate the habituation of reflexes. So there is a bit of "in the moment" learning to go with a bit of genetically-inherited instinct. There is some kind of contrast in adaptive behavioural response - the precursors to attention and habit. Yet also it is getting about as attenuated as we can imagine.

So I am speaking to a different model of a system - the model of an organism rather than a machine. A system that processes signs rather than information. And that is just a different paradigm with its own developmental and self organising logic.

I'm puzzled that you think "an NCC approach" or "an integration via recurrent networks" is somehow different to what I said. I'm also puzzled if you don't think I was specific about human introspective self-awareness being an added, culturally-evolved, linguistic skill.

If you want to side with Lamme and replace the dichotomy of habit~attention with feed-forward vs feedback - as the best way of getting away from having to talk about unconscious vs conscious - then that is not really different from what I said. I said habits are emitted fast and direct while attention is about the slower top-down evolution of novel states of global focus or constraint.

So where does an important difference lie with the cites you provide? I would say Lamme is an example of representationalism - the idea that consciousness involves some bottom-up data crunching that has to rise to some level and produce "a display" ... with all the homuncularity that then ensues in having pushed the "witnessing self" out of the picture again.

Byoung-Kyong Min is then an example of trying to locate consciousness to a particular brain structure rather than just focusing on the dynamics of integrative (and differentiating) neural processes. Again, representationalism hovers in the background. The talk is of neural states that are to be imagined as some sort of display (to whom?). Consciousness becomes a thing, a substance, as representationalism - in begging the question of how the extra quality of awareness arises - is basically dualistic and leaves us always with the two things of the neural display and the unanswered issue of how this extra feature of reportable witnessing can arise.

As I argue, the habit vs attention distinction is the routine way into understanding the functional anatomy of the brain. Anyone taking a general information processing route to explaining the brain will find this is a core structural dichotomy.

And then I distinguished my own position within this general standard approach. I said I was taking the ecological, systems thinking, sign processing, etc, etc, angle. So that marks a big shift in paradigm from data-processing and representationalism. It puts semiosis or a modelling relation approach centre stage.

When you hear me talk about attention, you immediately think about that as the creation of some kind of state of display. But I am thinking about attention in terms of constraint and the globally coherent suppression of possible neural activity. Attention brings things into focus by creating fleeting useful states of limitation. It is repression for a purpose, if we want to put it simply.

I object to your insistence on a single approach limited to attention and habit and on briefly reviewing some literature find many other approaches in the field. — prothero

Well you are misunderstanding what I said. Attention vs habit is a general distinction used to organise our scientific understanding of how brains "process the world". It was what got experimental psychology going in the 1800s. It kind of got lost with the heavily computational, data-processing, representationalism of 1970s cogsci, but has come back again as a foreground distinction with 1990s neuroscience.

Then within cognitive neuroscience - the study of the brain's functional anatomy - I stand with a number of counter-positions. So as I say, I am with the dynamicists, ecologists, the anti-representationalists, the Bayesians, and most particularly, the semiologists.

If you go in that direction far enough, you are then talking about brain function in terms of sign processing rather than information processing. The implicit dualism of representationalism has been left behind and now it is about a triadic modelling relation in which self and world co-emerge as a concrete causal state of affairs. The "I" is not a mysterious homuncular witness but instead the very action of imposing a state of constraint on material possibility.

Yes, this doesn't seem to explain "consciousness" - as a dualist/representationalist will always still believe it needs to be explained. It just doesn't speak to the issue of "the psychic cause of an aware display". But tough. That is why consciousness is such a bad term when it comes to doing science. It carries with it all its dualist/representationalist overtones. It is a verbal trap. Shifting the conversation to attention vs habit is the first step to breaking with this culturally and religiously entrenched metaphysical paradigm.

I think it is a difference in scale but then I am a panpsychist (panexperientialist) of sorts. — prothero

OK, so it is a difference in scale as the neuroscience suggests. But then you want to make some kind of claim about a difference in kind?

This is where we might discover if anything useful can be said about what you feel to be missing from my pragmatic account based on naturalistic or ecological information processing principles.

The assertion here is that "attention" is a primitive neurological function, seen in say frogs and fruitflies. Do we wish to say they are "aware" and "conscious" in the same manner as humans? — prothero

Is it a difference in kind or difference in scale? Is mind something only humans have or does the degree correlate with neural organisational complexity?

Both are reasonable hypotheses. And what we do know is that the degree of organisational complexity actually does correlate with how most people would rank sentience.

As to the rest, I don't think you could have read my earlier posts.