[Fis] First Author Response on Emotional Sentience

[Katherine Peil Kauffman]

Dear FIS Community,

Please forgive my delayed response as I’ve been out-of-state due to a family medical emergency. But that situation is stable now, and I can give this discussion the attention it deserves.

I’d like to thank everyone for such engaging, inspiring, and compelling comments and questions. It’s a pleasure to experience each personalized offering, and an honor to embrace the many strands of focus, interest, and previous exploration they represent. I see myriad overlaps with the core idea: That emotion serves as the inaugural “self-regulatory” sensory system in all living creatures, an outgrowth of the earliest forms of sensory-motor control, genetic, epigenetic, and immune regulation. Subjectively, it provides a uniquely identity-relevant stream of information and coupled (self-correcting) behavioral actions. And so much more.

Tomorrow (or soon), I’ll offer a more general response to the overlapping themes that have emerged, and within a framework that better describes the underlying metaphysic of my approach. But for today, I’d like to briefly address each of you, in the order received. (And if I have missed anyone, please resend your comments to me directly.)

 Marcus: Great points, and yes stimulus-response behavior is central to my model. To my mind, the “cognitive” revolution in psychology overshadowed the importance of black-box behavioristic principles. But we could not have learning, let alone complex cognition, without some experience of binary pleasure and pain (Pavlov’s original “unconditioned stimulus-response pair” – what I call the fundamental semantic information bit.) But the soft-wired informational component of emotion does not make sense without also understanding its hard-wired behavioral counterpart. Also, while thermodynamics is an important bridge between physical happenings and agentic doings, I promise not to make that reductionist move. (What I mean by “self-regulation” implies something akin to a Maxwellian daemon, sensing, remembering and deciding). There is also much to say also about  exploration and wanderlust, but for now I’ll just note that they are intrinsically rewarding because of the positive emotional valence serves the self-regulatory purpose of adaptive self-development – and all that it implies in terms of physical, psychosocial, moral and spiritual human development. 

Francesco: I love your concept of emotional rationality (as a dimension of emotional intelligence). The legacy of Cartesian dualism sadly pits emotion against reason, when there are very deep and biologically meaningful “emotional reasons” that have thus far remained opaque to science. I heartily agree that we need a new science of value, central to my mission! Please do share what your approach. Indeed, our emotional biology delivers the Platonic appreciation for The Good, The True and The Beautiful, as well as clarity on Justice that can help better inform The Legal.

Gordana: Thanks for the great article on the Sentient Cell. I’m thrilled to see this line of thinking becoming more mainstream. Our experience of emotion is like a course graining of  myriad layers of self-regulatory processes – at molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, neural, mental and social levels. While the embodied chemistry is well established, now Levin’s work demonstrates a deeper electromagnetic layer of stimulus and regulatory control. I will look to you as my guru on ethics!

Aaron: Thanks so much for your pioneering work on basal intelligence! I’d wish I’d known about it early on. Ganti’s Chemoton model, along Ashby’s Homeostat, were early inspirations! As were Hume’s view on moral sentiments and Kant’s view of parts and wholes! As an elder in this community, its an honor to engage with you here. I look forward to sitting at your knee and embracing your seasoned wisdom. I’ve love to discuss the role of affect in AI, and/or its intersection with the immune system (distress and eustress), inflammation, and placebo and nocebo effects.

Karl: Your mathematical insights about process, sequence, and transitive ordering resonate very deeply. While I’m hardly math literate, I’m a closet Platonist in my appreciation for maths as a primal language for The Book of Nature. There is something key here about self-reference and “incongruence” that I’d like to understand better, as well as your point about transitive sorting. I hope my Tao process metaphor helps you fit them in the proper place, as I see commutative as residing in one sphere and additive in another, same with index and sequential retrieval. Ultimately, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Fibonacci sequences, phi (The Golden Mean) and fractal geometry in pattern formation.

Joe: I hope to clarify what I mean by “logic” as there are entire philosophical spheres that are foreign to me. I’m most curious about your Predicate logic as I hear lovely consonance within my Tao story (that I’ll share tomorrow) in your complements of being and becoming, change and stability, internal and external, self and not-self. Please feel free to straighten me out (logic-wise, conceptually and linguistically) when I try to describe the binary computational process. I need to invent some term like “eduction” to add to deduction, induction, and abduction – although emotion has a role in each.

Eric: Thank you for making my task easier! Your comments about the nature and structure of identity are spot on. So too for the significance of both attachment and boundaries in optimal social relations and psychosocial development. The critical – epigenetic - development windows are key to many physiological and psychological disturbances and lasting traumas. You are prescient in your comments about communication as a fundamental form of action. Learning is also a primary form of adaptive action. Both learning and communication are what I call “right responses’,  optimal mindful creative actions that “right oneself”- rebalance the self-world relationship - in response to emotional experiences. As creators of culture, we humans have been doing this for eons. They are the conscious, intentional, cooperative “soft-wired” alternatives to hardwired , competitive, “fight and flight” behavioral defenses. This is where the three distinct levels of self-regulatory information become key. Once the foundational binary value system is embraced (a subjective link to the criteria for natural selection), a lovely virtue ethics falls from our emotional biology, complete with universally optimal (self-actualizing) or deficient (self-destructive) trajectories in both individual and social realms.

Stu: Thank you for raising the question about complex emotions such as schadenfreude. This is most important as both the chemistry of emotion and the hardwired behavioral impulses can be invested in destructive activity – and hijacked by emotionally manipulative others when the mind is not heeding the informational component. For example, us-versus-them tribalism is something we should have evolved away from long ago. It is self-destructive on both personal and social levels. It is an ideology that is not attuned to the egalitarian ecological values of nature, as all living systems have both identity and social dimensions of personal identity. Both a “me” and “we” self is being regulated from bacteria, slime molds, and up to humans, with the simple pleasure~pain semantic honoring each equally across time and space. But with humans, our need to bond with others is so powerful that we get a nice dopamine hit when an “enemy” or “other” experiences pain. This is fully a function of limited identity beliefs, but given how emotion-driven ego defenses are forged upon our embodied immune defense it is a predictable pitfall our emotional illiteracy and ignorance.

Alex: Great to have you here. I agree with that Stu’s instincts are top notch - but not second to none at our house! Haha! And let’s not throw out the digital baby with the bathwater, as it may be significant to your stuff on quantum criticality – which I find to be brilliant, and hope to hear about in this context.

Carlos: Thanks for your prescient work as well! I’ve just discovered your model, and you’ve captured something intriguing about the core distinction between basic and complex emotion. Indeed, the biology of emotion has plenty of implications for the development of AI. Your graduate student’s work on social isolation versus early socialization in dyadic relationships reflects some of the predictable emotional dynamics in terms of syncing in cooperative collectives. This is one lovely outcome of our universal preference for pursuing evermore complex pleasure – the emergence of evermore complex, ordered and cooperative collectives. Are you familiar with Kelso’s coordination dynamics? Deep stuff  on bodily movement and synced behavior.

Christophe: Thanks for pointing out the roots of emotion in our primate ancestors.  The late great Franz de Waal’s iconic video of our sense of fairness and justice – mediated by basic anger – speaks volumes https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDUtTR6VYA$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDUtTR6VYA$ >). As do the differences between Chimps and Bonobos, primate social systems arrange loosely by negative or positive emotion respectively. But our emotional roots actually go very much deeper, with the behaviors associated with the basic emotions observable in mammals if not reptiles. In fact, the wonderful single-celled creature Stentor exhibits several of these as well as Pavlovian learning (See Dennis Bray’s Wetware), and binary emotional signals can be traced all the way down to bacteria.

Plamen: Thanks so much for backstage suggestions and examples for discussion. The films The Big Short and Wall Street, are indeed great examples of the destructive dynamics of greed, short-term profit, and a competitive, consumer and growth-only oriented economy on a planet with finite resources. The question of AI systems delivering therapy is huge too. Have you met Sophia?  (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDVN4y8toQ$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDVN4y8toQ$ >.  I see some benefit as a supplement to human therapy, particularly as it concerns learning what information the various emotions are offering, the universal needs they represent, the personal and social strategies for meeting them, and the optimal responses they suggest. This part can be quite “algorithmic”. But nothing can replace the therapeutic effects of genuine human emotional connection, the synchronicity and improvisational serendipity of flow. (I also thought of the new book Rural Rage, as a good example as it parses the difference between anger, resentment and rage – and how they can harnessed for political gain.) So many roads to choose, so little - and precious - time. I will rely on your judgement as the discussion unfolds.

Pedro: Thank you so much for appreciating my work and being “the man behind the curtain”, jumping in with just the right responses when I could not. Again, I wish I’d known about your take on information way back in the day, your 2003 paper is still so far ahead of its time. When this is all over, I will miss you like Dorothy misses the Scarecrow.

Until tomorrow or soonish,

Kate
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