[Fis] Emotional Sentience & Information

[a.sloman at bham.ac.uk]

Dear Kate,
(following your naming suggestion)

I am pleased to meet you online!

You wrote

> 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'll try to locate these important ideas in a broader context:

Over many years, with the help of various colleagues from several disciplines
(including some on the Fis list) I have been exploring these issues in the
CogAff (Cognition and Affect) project and related projects, challenging much of
what has been written about emotions and various related 'affective' states and
processes.

That's because, understandably, most authors write from a standpoint including a
collection of concepts, questions, research methods and theoretical frameworks
that are products of relatively recent human social (academic) history, ignoring
evidence related to the evolution of various interacting forms of life over many
millenia, and the roles of biochemical mechanisms involved in processes of
evolution, reproduction, development, learning and interacting with the
environment, including features of the environment that are products of the
above relatively recent processes, such as effects of human technologies,
customs, and social constraints/influences in different parts of the planet.

There are some researchers who are exceptions, including Lynn Margulis (e.g. her
work on symbiogenesis), tragically cut short by an early death, and the work of
neuroscientist Seth Grant and his colleagues in Edinburgh University on the
unnoticed relevance of biochemical processes in synapses to important aspects of
intelligence.

Inspired by those ideas (and others, including Kant's comments on limitations of
David Hume's theories) my own work, begun over half a century ago, has recently
taken a new turn leading to a conjecture that the earliest ancestors of animals
with brains were single-celled organisms that were ancestors of current
synapses, which began to engage in various forms of collaboration, producing
increasingly complex organisms in which nervous systems evolved to enable
communication and coordination between subsystems, initially linking synapse
ancestors, then later providing connections to increasingly remote and
increasingly complex body parts, e.g. digestive systems, circulatory systems,
breathingn systems, movable limbs or wings, etc.

I now think that those ancient biochemical mechanisms in synapses can provide
answers to questions about ancient forms of human intelligence leading to
discoveries in geometry and topology, such as Pythagoras' theorem, centuries
before Pythagoras was born, using mechanisms that are related to forms of
intelligence in other species e.g. nest-building birds, apes, elephants, aquatic
mammals, etc. Octopuses are an amazing special case that I don't pretend to
understand!

I have recently been working on an online document about all this (still work in
progress) including references to a huge, varied, and still growing collection
of evidence, along with my own new speculations about synapses (still under
development) available here:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/metamorphosis.html__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!STfKJ-tvmFDeSUubIX6C43WsVpLlshOlBrc-ytpa_EUAIW_NYRotcvQvUrVaXd_OtJZ7PNnrJgSZaseQizhhFzg$ 

It is about much more than metamorphosis, discussing the amazing forms of
control that transform a previously crawling insect into a flying animal with
entirely new behaviours (e.g. flying to plants and feeding on nectar) inside a
cocoon or chrysalis, where the transformations require forms of remote control
that I don't think can be explained using any currentlyh available theories, and
which may require changes in fundamental physical theories (which I have been
discussing with a colleague, an old friend from our student days, awarded a
Nobel-prize in theoretical physics).

I hope that mades some sense, despite my 87 year old downhill-sliding dementia-damaged
brain.

I don't think current popular concepts of 'emotion' are rich enough to support
these theories.

I welcome comments, criticisms, suggestions for corrections or additions, and
references to additional relevant publications (preferably easily available
online publications).

I apologise for the complex and messy structure of that document, still being
revised and extended, with much more work required. I hope this (over?)
compressed summary is not too incomprehensible.

I think this message is the most over-compressed document I have ever produced.
Sorry about that.

Best wishes,

Aaron
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/*axs__;fg!!D9dNQwwGXtA!STfKJ-tvmFDeSUubIX6C43WsVpLlshOlBrc-ytpa_EUAIW_NYRotcvQvUrVaXd_OtJZ7PNnrJgSZaseQqWjzscA$ 

Aaron Sloman,
Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science
Retired, but still working full time, on the Meta-Morphogenesis project.
I no longer have space in my department, so I work at home with downhill-sliding
brain, logged through to my linux PC in the departmental computer room kindly
looked after by our computer officers.

School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston Birmingham
B15 2TT UK