This article is a spiritual continuation of the Paul Ekman piece and of the Mindfulness piece. It concludes the mini-series on the inspection of what emotions are and what causes them. This article doesn’t really have any practical Red Pill application, but it is a theory lunchpad for future concepts. Well, let’s get to it.
Here I will present the Constructed Theory of Emotions, a model that originates from Lisa Barrett and discussed on her book, but its roots are much older in Kant, actually.
The first 100 or so pages are good
In short, and contrasting Ekman (in whom emotions are reactions to external events), under this model, emotions are flexible mental concepts which the brain uses to summarise the moment-to-moment experiences. Not unlike an “apple” can mean all these things:
But we still regard the concept of an “apple” as well defined. You know what an apple is, but now apply the same thing to happiness, sadness, etc. And in conclusion, an emotion does not exist as an evolutionary or bodily function, but only as a mental shortcut.
First, we will summarise three results from neuroscience, before we mix some theory of mind philosophy.
The illusion of free will
This is an old result from the 1980s that aims to prove that there is no “free will”, but in reality, it just proves that consciousness is a secondary product of the brain, not the primary initiator.
It goes like this:
- The subject is hooked up to a machine to scan the brain (electronic encephalograph – EEG).
- He is given a choice, choose a button on left (blue) or right (red).
- He is asked to make a choice first and press the button second.
- He records the time of his decision, then the time of the action (pressing the bottom).
- The timings are compared with the EEG output.
The scheduling action is planned at the pre-motor cortex, (above your ear and to the front). If your right PMC is excited, it controls the left side of the body, and so the subject chooses the left button. If the left PMC is excited, we have the same situation vice versa. Hence, the PMC (either left or right) is gonna get excited at the time of decision and button press. That is the story, so let’s see the results:
What is displayed here is that the PMC is excited, as expected, marked by “intention to act,” but it is also excited before the conscious decision is made. In some variations, up to a whole 10 seconds beforehand. That is called the “gap of free will”, essentially asking the question: “How is the brain active before consciousness has come to the same conclusion?”. Concluding eventually that consciousness is not the thing that drives the brain.
There are variants of this experiment where scientists remotely (with radio waves) excite the subjects’ PMC before the decision. This swayed the subjects’ choice (to the targeted hemisphere) with 80% accuracy.
Commentary
We have now built block number 1: the brain operates below the level of consciousness, or better put, consciousness is a by-product of brain activity and subservient to it rather than the other way around.
Aside: I don’t like that this experiment is tied to “free will” rather than consciousness; there are better philosophical arguments to refute free will, and we don’t need to go to such lengths as studying the brain for it.
Interoception
Interoception essentially means that there are no independent regions in the brain. In particular, some regions associated with “body budget”, i.e., how many resources are expected to be consumed from the body in the following moments, are so interconnected with everything that no decision (i.e., brain activity) can be made independently of them.
Here is the issue visually, these are the regions associated with body budgeting:
[From Barrett’s book]
In plain English, what we said before means that if you are hungry, let’s say, then your body budget regions are locked in some configuration associated with it. Then any subsequent brain activity cannot (functionally) be independent of you being hungry, as the brain network is already partially defined by it.
The famous example is regarding judges and paroles in the US:
This graph sugarcoats the actual result of the study, which was that the hungrier the judges were getting (before the brakes), the less likely they were to grant paroles.
Commentary
There is nothing new with this result. This is exactly the concept of frames and framing, with the added twist that all thought actually has to go “through the body”. Or that your body itself is a giant framing axis for all your thoughts. Actually so dominant that it trumps all other axes.
Therefore, hunger, physical pain, physical pleasure, level of exercise, how much sunlight you are getting, etc., define your thinking first and in particular more than anything else. A result that actually proves Nietzsche’s obsession with the body, and that everything is physical first before intellectual (and hence all morality is also biological by extension).
The predictive brain
This is the dominant neuroscientific model of the brain in recent times. The idea is that if you take the brain to be fully reactive, then you have multiple contradictions. I won’t get into detail, but here are some visual examples to showcase the point:
The flash-lag effect showcases that the brain predicts the position of objects, so you see the flicking cube move faster.
The brain fills in the image to construct two triangles, without their presence. In neuroscientific terms, your visual neurons fire in the absence of external signal.
All the “fake shadow” illusions work because your brain simulates (predicts) the image holistically in the absence of moment-to-moment feedback. The pure visual feedback would showcase two squares of the same color.
We can go on and on with this, but the bottom line is that there is significant evidence that the brain works as a predictive machine. Your perception right now is a prediction of your brain one moment in the past. The way the brain updates your perception of reality is just by corrections to the predictive model. Not unlike how a YouTube video works, where the data that your computer receives is in regards to pixels that must change color, while if there is no update, the pixel maintains the same color as the previous step.
To illustrate this final point, let’s consider vision. The signal goes from the eyes to thalamus and then to the visual cortex at the back of the head. However, take a look at how many more blocking connections come from the visual cortex to the thalamus:
From Barrett’s book
And since we are on the topic and to tie this back to interoception, see how many more connections come from the body budgeting regions to the visual cortex:
From Barrett’s book
In particular, estimates have it that 90% of vision is not from the eyes. Extend the same concept to all senses, and you have the “predictive brain model”.
Interlude to Philosophy
The final building block is the concept of “categories and concepts” from philosophy. I am not sure the source of the concept, but I am following Barrett’s book here nonetheless.
What we are aiming for is a model of how the brain groups information. A category is meant to correspond to the real world and be everything we might name under the same grouping. For example, a Fiat and a Ferrari are both under the category of car, but of course, physically, they are totally different.
These are both “cars”
What makes a category different from a concept, which itself is also a grouping, is that the concept is abstract, and it is the mental representation of the category in your brain. For example, when I prompt you with “tell me what is a car” maybe you will answer with this:
The concept of “car”
Repeating: category is a grouping in the real world, while concept is the abstract candidate representing the grouping.
Now, this is not all theoretical mumbo jumbo; similar to frames, there is evidence that categories and concepts direct thinking. For example, take the following optical illusion:
If you prime your brain with the “numbers” category (vertical), you see 13. If you prime your brain with the “letters” category (horizontal), then you see B.
The Constructed Theory of Emotion
We now have all the tools to explain the theory.
Connection with Categories and Concepts
We claim that emotions are simply categories. The mental representation we have of them is simply the concept of them. For example, we associate happiness with a smile, but also all the following are acceptable realizations of “happiness”:
- cry in happiness
- scream in happiness
- jump in happiness
- etc.
All these fall into category of happiness
The fact that despite the realizations of the category, we maintain a concept of happiness is what causes all the tunnel vision around emotions. The mental representative is strictly too narrow to explain what is happening.
Connection with the Gap of Free Will
However, as you might have already noticed, if the “emotion” is not biologically defined (in opposition to Ekman), then it is conceptually defined and hence a product of consciousness (by definition). Doubly so because it is a category, and hence fully lives fluidly in the realm of consciousness (nobody forces us to call the Fiat and the Ferrari as “cars”; it is a product of reason we do so).
As the gap of free will section already proved, however, anything that is a product of consciousness is actually a product of underlying brain activity, as the faculty of reason sits on top of undefined mental activity below it.
Connection with Interoception
As all brain activity is intertwined with the physical state of the body, when consciousness declares a feeling as “emotion X”, then X is a product of the physical state itself following the law of interoception. Hence, when consciousness declares X to be happiness, it is just the contextual interpretation of the bodily state, or better put, a physiological interpretation in “context”. But then what is “context”? It leads us to…
Connection with the predictive brain
So what is context? What could it be if not your brain’s understanding of the situation, which, as we already established, is a prediction made one moment in the past.
This prediction regulates the body budgeting regions of the brain, which in turn regulate interoception, which in turn regulates consciousness, which finally interprets everything into a grouping that it calls emotion.
And there you have it. This is what makes emotions.
