[Fis] Emotional Sentience & Information

[Katherine Peil]

Hello FIS community,

Katherine Peil Kauffman here, a recent “lurker” following Stuart Kauffman’s (and a bit of Carlos’) offerings on the nature of information. I found it tremendously inspiring and am now honored to take the discussion in the direction of the role of the emotional system in biological information processing and basal intelligence.

To briefly introduce myself, my inquiry into the nature and function of emotion began in clinical psychology, moved through participation in the formation of “positive” psychology, and ultimately to the search for biological grounds to justify the value system implied in the feel-good feel-bad categories of feeling. An inter-disciplinary complex systems approach culminated in an alternative understanding of the emotional system, emphasizing its ancient pre-neural origins in genetic, epigenetic, and immune regulation as well as first forms of sensory-motor control.

Central to this new view is that emotion offers a stream of “self-regulatory” information  (distinct from “cognition” proper) that has remained opaque to science. Placing emotion in this deeper biological functional context sheds new light our personal, interpersonal, transcendent experiences. I have attached a brief but condensed synopsis of this work, ending with a link to my personal website that houses papers, talks, and even a little “self-help” seminar book for “Mastering Emotional Intelligence” I put together some 25 years ago. (There’s a little something for everyone there depending upon how wide or deep the desired dive.)

But my hope for this session is to simply set forth these new ideas and focus upon the informational logic that I find to be encoded in emotional qualia. I encourage you to please take up any strands of inquiry, concern, pushback and/or synergy as we explore this new territory.

I look forward to a rollicking discussion.

With special thanks to Pedro and Plaman,

Katherine Peil Kauffman   (Call me Kate if you want!)
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