[Fis] First Author Response on Emotional Sentience

[Pedro C. Marijuán]

Dear All,

I am coping with a sudden medical circumstance in my family. During some 
time I might rather disconnected.

It is important that all FISers maintain the maximum of 3 messages per 
week. Please!
For the new parties, the counting of messages starts on Monday and ends 
in Sunday (international business week).

My best wishes to all of you,

--Pedro

El 13/04/2024 a las 10:01, Christophe Menant escribió:
>
> Dear Kate,
>
> Thanks for your answer to our comments that allows interesting 
> overview and synergy on different perspectives.
>
> Let me just add a brief comment about your “fundamental semantic 
> information bit” that could be related to “binary good or bad feeling” 
> by meaning generation.
>
> Good or bad feeling can be related to basic constraint satisfaction 
> (stay alive, limit anxiety, look for happiness…). And the “fundamental 
> semantic information bit” can be the meaning generated by the organism 
> to trigger actions (physical or mental) leading to constraint 
> satisfaction.
>
> If you are interested there is a short paper summarizing that at 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-7__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TBXy0f27tXSasASJy0-RGacxPLWI-TgLo5LE1C9-zxyuUj9YEb1Lvmmlbqa_MMK8QOGiKKrPDZ5xudDH-uyBmSKzYs-Q$  
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-7__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UJIeLe2_kaEJ3FepzdpsTvPaLzot4Xqm_MNyH1sZ5CCjAJBCYDNPJwCjrmGLp3t8i3jZvNxk2SO0kSHC5OgOk-dnorJa2RGz$>
>
> All the best
>
> Christophe
>
> *De :*Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> *De la part de* Katherine 
> Peil Kauffman
> *Envoyé :* vendredi 12 avril 2024 23:51
> *À :* fis at listas.unizar.es
> *Objet :* [Fis] First Author Response on Emotional Sentience
>
> 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!TBXy0f27tXSasASJy0-RGacxPLWI-TgLo5LE1C9-zxyuUj9YEb1Lvmmlbqa_MMK8QOGiKKrPDZ5xudDH-uyBmXiecjkS$  
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDUtTR6VYA$>). 
> As do the differences between Chimps and Bonobos, primate social 
> systems arrange loosely by negative or positive emotion respectively. 
> But our emotional roots actually go very much deeper, with the 
> behaviors associated with the basic emotions observable in mammals if 
> not reptiles. In fact, the wonderful single-celled creature Stentor 
> exhibits several of these as well as Pavlovian learning (See Dennis 
> Bray’s Wetware), and binary emotional signals can be traced all the 
> way down to bacteria.
>
> *Plamen:* Thanks so much for backstage suggestions and examples for 
> discussion. The films The Big Short and Wall Street, are indeed great 
> examples of the destructive dynamics of greed, short-term profit, and 
> a competitive, consumer and growth-only oriented economy on a planet 
> with finite resources. The question of AI systems delivering therapy 
> is huge too. Have you met Sophia? 
>  (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TBXy0f27tXSasASJy0-RGacxPLWI-TgLo5LE1C9-zxyuUj9YEb1Lvmmlbqa_MMK8QOGiKKrPDZ5xudDH-uyBmdXqBhvP$  
> <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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