[Fis] Emotional Sentience & The Tao - Author Responses

[Katherine Peil Kauffman]

Dear FIS community,

It has been an honor and pleasure to learn so much from you all. Although information science is new to me, I am finding treasure troves from many directions that lend support to my emotion model. 

Aaron: To my mind, your emphasis on origin and function of synapses gets to the deeper dynamics of computation in networks, the central role of relational connectivity, and how possibilities get tweaked up and down in Domain 0.

Stuart: Your point about the unmanifest in Jain tradition reminded me that I forgot to mention contextuality as one of the key quantum features. Also too, the moral imperative in Jainism is perhaps the closest to that within our emotional biology: “Do not do that to others which pains thyself”. This is the reverse of the Golden Rule because the conditions which cause emotional pain are universal. Self-preservation gets the highest priority, which is why 4 out of 5 basic emotions are painful: Sadness (is about loss, loss of energy, need-meeting resources, etc); Disgust (is about contamination of food, poison, and germ aversion); Fear (is about threats in the immediate environment), and Anger (is about just and equitable human dignity, agentic freedom and personal empowerment). This information is encoded in what is called the appraisal themes of the various emotions and they bridge cleanly to a set of universal needs similar to Maslow’s needs hierarchy.

Krassimir: Yes! The [-1, 0,+1] interval describes the No~Yes dualist language of the body, and the logic of Negative~Positive emotion - which occurs in Domain 1. But the 0 would imply the optimal state of Tao-like balance on the edge-of-chaos, the homeodynamic state to which the system will return to as part of the corrective response. This is the basis of the negative feedback homeostasis and constraint closure. At a deeper level, in Domain 0 where language of waves (oscillations) is spoken; this 0 state of balance relates to the natural harmonic of the particular geometric, phenotypal structure of the living organism. This feels like the home state, like lowest energy state, emotionally relaxed and peaceful.

Plamen: The connection between physical and psychological “stress” is central to understanding the self-regulatory function of emotion. Keely’s work demonstrating the connection between feeling sick, inflammation, and feeling sad – energy loss from the system. The connection between brain and body are manifold, including the immune system, the HPA axis, endocrine and paracrine systems, polyvagal nerve, the microbiome, even epigenetic methylation as memory marks. However, the informational and causal flow goes both ways. Emotion is the language – the music – of the body. The binary feelings in emotional pleasure and pain (what Selye originally called Eustress~Distress) offer a course graining of all these lower levels and those conjured by our mindscape feed back down yielding placebo and nocebo effects (in addition to inflammatory responses and chronic disease).

Christophe: Through Gordana’s link I’ve learned a bit more about your Meaning Making System. It’s wonderful in that it goes beyond syntactics to address semantics – values, which is largely missing from most approaches. But I would add that organisms have two overarching evolutionary purposes, adaptive self-development (which includes all learning) as well as “must stay alive”.

Gordana: You are a kindred soul indeed. Between your papers and that lovely talk on the role of natural computations undergirding basal intelligence you’ve pointed directly to some key features of our emotional sense. Since the parallels are so many, I’ll just offer some contrasts and additions. First, while Kahneman’s dual process model remains popular, its use in psychology still carries the pejorative Cartesian idea that the bottom-up pathways that inform the fast system are inferior and foul the mindscape with “cognitive biases” – much of which are rooted in misunderstandings of emotional processes. Second, I’m completely on board with Jablonka in terms of the Evolution of the Sensitive Soul – with one addition: She pins it all on associative learning but does not give Pavlov or emotion their rightful due. Learning in living systems requires the fundamental semantic information bit that we experience as emotional (affective, hedonic) qualia. It is the “unconditioned” stimulus-response pair within classical Pavlovian conditioning, innate evaluative punishment and reward. Third, I hear you on that “speaking about that which cannot be spoken” thing. Its taken 35 years for  science sufficient to frame the emotional system. Then again, “The Tao that can be spoken, is not The Tao”  ~ Lao Tzu

Mike: Your work has been revelatory in identifying the deeper bioelectric levels of self-regulatory process and the sensory stimulus undergirding emotion. Thank you. For example, the Comparison step of my little loop of mind (the ongoing comparison between self and not-self, between internal and external environments) can be instantiated bio-electrically at the cellular level by the High~Low cell membrane potential V, which provides the step 2 Signal via polarized~depolarized states, which carries the Yes~No, Good~Bad Evaluation (depolarization being associated with cancer). Please correct me if I’ve misinterpreted or taken too much liberty. But this upward bridge to affect is huge. I also see a downward bridge to Watson’s natural induction via Song and Hoffman’s Markov Kernels, via emotional resonance~dissonance.

Pedro: Your absence herein has been palpable. I hope life is delivering its very best to you and yours. As this month comes to a close, please know that I’m happy to continue this discussion if there is sufficient interest. 

With all best wishes, 

Kate Kauffman


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