Final Report Summary - EMOTER (Emoting the Embodied Mind)
EMOTER reconceptualizes many affective phenomena from an “enactive” perspective, according to which the physical basis of the mind is not the brain only, but the living organism. The enactive approach importantly also emphasizes lived experience: the mind is not reducible to a series of non-conscious cognitive processes, but it centrally involves experience; this aspect of the mind needs to be studied rigorously, with the instruments of the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Enactivism also maintains that phenomenological accounts of experience should be incorporated into the scientific study of the mind, to constrain experimental designs and help interpret the results of third-person neuroscientific measurements.
EMOTER takes these ideas and develops them specifically in the domain of affectivity—broadly understood to include emotions (such as happiness, anger, guilt, etc.), moods and motivational states. The outcome of this development is twofold: i) an enactivist reconceptualization of several phenomena studied in affective science (mainly, but not only, the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of emotion); and ii) an elaboration of the enactive approach itself, which before EMOTER had focused primarily on traditionally cognitive processes (mainly perception), with relatively little attention to affectivity.
One idea I advance in EMOTER is that all living organisms, as embodied, autonomous and adaptive, are intrinsically affective—in the broad sense that they are sensitive to their surroundings and concerned with their existence. Because of this pervasive and “primordial” affective dimension, organisms live in surroundings that have significance and value to them. Also, affectivity thus understood is not separate from cognition; rather, cognition is itself a form of affectivity. In human beings this pervasive affective dimension can be qualified phenomenologically as awareness of oneself as effortful and striving, and as receptive and non-indifferent. More specifically, when it comes to emotions, I argue that they are distinct patterns of self-organization of the whole organism. As such, they are neither “affect programs” nor entities constructed via acts of linguistic categorization. Rather, as processual and self-organizing, they are best characterized via the conceptual tools of dynamical systems theory. Similarly for moods, which differ from emotions in that they are longer-lasting dynamical patterns of the organism that make the shorter-term patterns characteristic of emotional episodes more or less likely. In terms of lived experience, I argue that whereas many emotions involve conspicuous bodily feelings, the latter do not exhaust the sense in which emotion experiences are bodily. The body can be felt during an emotional episode in subtle ways, including for example what I call “background” bodily feelings: bodily feelings in which the body is not experienced as an intentional object, but rather as that through which the world is interpreted in a certain way. One implication of this view is that, in emotional episodes, our experience of appraising the world (e.g. as offensive, dangerous, welcoming) should not be seen as separate from, and preceding, feelings of bodily arousal; rather, the latter can be constitutive of the former.
EMOTER also discusses affective phenomena in relation to other people and material aspects of the world. I analyse the many ways in which we relate and feel others as embodied organisms, via basic empathy, sympathy, mimicry, and other processes; and how our interactions with others serve to regulate and “scaffold” our affective states. Finally, EMOTER also suggests that, in some cases, it is possible to regard affective processes as literally including material parts of the environment—such as notebooks, musical instruments, other objects—thus arguing that affective states are not just embodied, but can even be “extended” into the world.
EMOTER takes these ideas and develops them specifically in the domain of affectivity—broadly understood to include emotions (such as happiness, anger, guilt, etc.), moods and motivational states. The outcome of this development is twofold: i) an enactivist reconceptualization of several phenomena studied in affective science (mainly, but not only, the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of emotion); and ii) an elaboration of the enactive approach itself, which before EMOTER had focused primarily on traditionally cognitive processes (mainly perception), with relatively little attention to affectivity.
One idea I advance in EMOTER is that all living organisms, as embodied, autonomous and adaptive, are intrinsically affective—in the broad sense that they are sensitive to their surroundings and concerned with their existence. Because of this pervasive and “primordial” affective dimension, organisms live in surroundings that have significance and value to them. Also, affectivity thus understood is not separate from cognition; rather, cognition is itself a form of affectivity. In human beings this pervasive affective dimension can be qualified phenomenologically as awareness of oneself as effortful and striving, and as receptive and non-indifferent. More specifically, when it comes to emotions, I argue that they are distinct patterns of self-organization of the whole organism. As such, they are neither “affect programs” nor entities constructed via acts of linguistic categorization. Rather, as processual and self-organizing, they are best characterized via the conceptual tools of dynamical systems theory. Similarly for moods, which differ from emotions in that they are longer-lasting dynamical patterns of the organism that make the shorter-term patterns characteristic of emotional episodes more or less likely. In terms of lived experience, I argue that whereas many emotions involve conspicuous bodily feelings, the latter do not exhaust the sense in which emotion experiences are bodily. The body can be felt during an emotional episode in subtle ways, including for example what I call “background” bodily feelings: bodily feelings in which the body is not experienced as an intentional object, but rather as that through which the world is interpreted in a certain way. One implication of this view is that, in emotional episodes, our experience of appraising the world (e.g. as offensive, dangerous, welcoming) should not be seen as separate from, and preceding, feelings of bodily arousal; rather, the latter can be constitutive of the former.
EMOTER also discusses affective phenomena in relation to other people and material aspects of the world. I analyse the many ways in which we relate and feel others as embodied organisms, via basic empathy, sympathy, mimicry, and other processes; and how our interactions with others serve to regulate and “scaffold” our affective states. Finally, EMOTER also suggests that, in some cases, it is possible to regard affective processes as literally including material parts of the environment—such as notebooks, musical instruments, other objects—thus arguing that affective states are not just embodied, but can even be “extended” into the world.