In the existential principles and biological registers topic we asked the question: ‘if language and thought; the mind; does not resolve the conflicting registers and guide the whole animal then what does? We did not fully answer this question but did end with noting that existential principles lie behind the basic emotions. For each emotion we are going to approach them from their whole body role; from their existential principle.
With emotion the brain/body is considerably distanced from the mind. The simple proof of this is that we have no words that refer to emotions as individual entities. The references are only to degrees of emotion. The emotions are powerful movers in our animal existence but we have strange conditions around referring to them. I was apprehensive before the meeting. Did your fear abate during the meeting? What do you mean, I wasn’t frightened?
There are two factors at work in the above example. Firstly the words are taken to refer to different things and secondly there are chains on both the inner and outer dialogues at this point. Showing fear, and by extension admitting to it in both inner and outer dialogues, makes animals vulnerable and we avoid this. If we do not recognise that apprehension and fear are part of the same emotion, then it becomes very difficult to understand the emotion. The same is true for disappointed and sad, irritated and angry, satisfied and happy and interest and excitement. Few people would agree that interest and excitement are the same emotion. The others make some sort of sense but the difference in degree keeps them apart. In order that we can keep a clear focus on the emotion that we are studying we will always refer to them by combining low and high register pairs; apprehensive/fearful etc.
We now turn our attention to the six biological emotions. What are they for? We have to start with the question why have they evolved? We will examine each of them in turn.
There are known to be six biological register emotions. They are entirely separate from one another and are turned on all the time at varying levels of intensity. Their purpose is to inform all other biological processes, including life modeling activity in the brain, of an important state or event that affects the whole animal and the way that it relates to the world that it is in. ‘Informing’, here, means changing the state of other registers or life models. Emotions are vital. Our shared attention mind largely refers to them when they are at high registers as then it cannot easily overlook their presence. This fact really muddies our understanding of the emotions so first we are going to refer to the very common low levels that we experience.
When idling; involved but not particularly ‘challenged’; you will be sailing on a relatively calm sea made up of waves of slight irritation, slight disappointment, slight apprehension, slight satisfaction and slight interest. If somebody asks how you feel you might pick on one of these to name but you are more likely to say ‘nothing’. You would not pick ‘slight interest’ because we do not think of it as an emotion at all. Too quickly we need an object for it. You will only become aware as one of them, undetected by the mind, makes it into focussed attention. In a ‘relaxed state’; which includes state of mind; you might feel the waves as each emotion dips in and out of focussed attention, or you might find that your inner dialogue is referring to a topic/object that links to the emotion currently dominant. In other words your mind does not think of the emotion but is influenced in what it thinks by the presence of the emotion. This true of how many biological registers work.
The shape of the way that the emotions ‘balance out’ is also related to your peculiar settings, a gift of biological variation: though experience plays a small part. In the case of apprehension/fear we know that the settings can be influenced in baby/toddler hood from the experience of frequent intense fear. This is of course different than ‘learning to live with’ high levels of fear.
The emotions at their extreme ends are anger, sadness, fear, happiness and excitement (sometimes referred to in research as surprise which is really a type of excitement). The sixth biological emotion is disgust but this has an ‘alert’ state before a range of intensity kicks in.
All the basic emotions have a dual structure. The part of the emotion that we feel is the biological messenger itself at work in our brain/body. The degree to which we feel it is partly to do with the intensity needed for it to change other body/brain registers and partly to both energise and respond to the activities of its dedicated perception monitoring model (how we are ‘seeing/sensing’ the world). This is the other half of the dual structure.
Our underlying perspective for all the basic emotions is the simple animal body
Apprehension/fear
In its travels the simple animal body can be damaged and killed by encounters. Is there a way that it can get early awareness of what might damage and kill it? ‘It’ needs to evolve a way of selecting encounters that alert it to the possibility of injury and death. This can be achieved by developing senses and then particular perceptual models of sensory content that identify threats to life (threat perception). It also needs to evolve a messenger that travels all around its body and makes changes to how its other registers are working. For example the messenger could maximise rapid oxygen content, prepare movement models and their associated muscles and shut down the digestion system; the latter in order that the available energy can be used in the attempt to save its life. This bio-chemical messenger is apprehension/fear.
Apprehension/fear is still a constant companion for all of us. Why do we prefer to eat when we are relaxed? This is because our stomach muscles can relax and our blood can flow to our stomach rather than concentrate on taking nutrients to the muscles in our back, arms and legs. The more apprehensive/fearful we are the more likely we are to eat less and have poor digestion of what we do eat. None of this is in the control of your mind though it can influence matters. We often change the biochemical balance directly by drinking alcohol before and during eating.
How do we sensibly bridge the account of our actions and awareness’s to the simple animal body that we are studying? This is where the crayfish come in. We now know that crayfish feel apprehension/fear. They even respond in the same way as us to medicines (bio-chemicals) developed to make us less anxious. Though it is good to find evidence of what must be theoretically true I was also interested in the reaction of the team who carried out the research. They were concerned about the practise of dropping live crayfish into boiling water. This is very similar to what is said to tourists as they choose the fish that is going to be killed and cooked for them to eat. ‘It is not frightened and will not feel any pain’. In relating to other animals we find one of our most muddled, inconsistent and conflicted group of beliefs (‘sentences’ that we commit to/tag as true). I prefer the equality that animals were shown in the middle ages when they lived and died alongside us. The equality was such that there are cases of animals; usually pigs; being put on trial for killing people.
In the simplest animals, the apprehension/fear messenger shuts down digestion and kicks in movement. This evolves into movement either away from the source of threat or movement towards it, the latter being preparation to fight. Flight or fight depends on the situation and/or species preference. The ‘situation’ includes the perceptual modeling for the biochemical testosterone which is key to the choice of fight or flight. Even in humans when a source of threat cannot be spatially located; i.e. identified as an object in space; or when we are trapped in an environment, we then find ourselves purposelessly just moving. When we see a threat object we freeze and only move in a way that avoids the attention of the threat object. The relation between apprehension/fear and a tendency to avoid and to freeze (begin to shut down) is evident even in our encounters with each other in the social world. When we cannot physically move away then the messenger shifts to its highest degree of apprehension/fear in order to maximise the change in our body and muscles. Much like over revving the engine when stuck in the mud. It can only shout louder.
Apprehension/fear is as fundamental to our social biology as it is to our individual one. For a social animal, separation from the group and/or rejection from the group is life threatening. Fear of rejection is a deep force in human experience at every level from apprehension to extreme fear. The perceptual modeler that we are most aware of is threat perception. This is because of its existential force. Also, threat perception can be signaled to others in your group. These often become adopted registers used by other species present in the same environment.
Arising general points about emotion
The best way to think of the relationship between the perceptual model part of the emotion of apprehension/fear and the bio-chemical messenger is to grasp that the perceptual model is designed and dedicated to finding any evidence at all of threat. If the only emotional perceptual model that you had functioning was the threat perception one then you would be frightened of everything. It would take over your body/brain including focussed attention and the content of inner and outer dialogues (thought and talk; mind). This is what is meant by saying that all the basic emotions are turned on all the time; their perceptual models are searching in every corner for evidence of their existential principles, expressed and evolved as lived registers. They compete with each other to dominate other registers that they have access to and in order to get into, and to hold, focussed attention. In practise this means that we feel the emotion more strongly and search for corresponding ‘objects’ and/or episodes. It does not mean that we know what we are feeling i.e. our mind identifies it by naming it.
The mind will struggle hard to keep focussed attention for itself especially when in a social situation with high dialogue demand. This is why we try and be with either close friends or on our own when an emotion has a strong grip on focussed attention. The emotions can arrive in the mind in many ways depending on what words have got stuck to what experiences and what language patterns. The active presence of the emotions in episodic memory leads through meaning clusters/semantic memory (meaning and grammar) and into mind. Here they face a massive battle to play a part not only because of the individuals complexity, and its extensively conflicted moment by moment condition, but because they have arrived not just into a personal physical world but into a social world where ‘what you think’ has evolved not for your benefit but for the wider task of ensuring the survival of the group.
Irritation/anger
In its travels the simple animal body has encounters with its food source and with objects with whom it takes part in reproduction. Fine, that works out well then. Nothing else needed. Well no, here lives irritation/anger because things more often than not do not turn out well. What, within sensory information and body awareness, is this biological messenger linked to? It is linked to ‘difficulty’. It is interesting how often abstract words can have an animal general experience as a core. Remember this is not a flat world of comment and observation. Things only happen in this world through energy. In order to adapt to anything our animal needs energy of some kind.
Let’s create a technical term to sit alongside threat perception called difficulty perception. How hard is it to hang onto this piece of seaweed and grab bits of plankton to digest? Something bumps into what I am trying to digest as I am half way through and I have to hang on more tightly. The sea current moves with more force as a large fish swims by and I have to stop digesting to hold on even tighter. Difficulty perception evolves in the same way as threat perception. It registers the challenge and the biological messenger we know as irritation/anger goes round the body changing things. Some of what it does at the intense end is similar to the biological messenger for apprehension/fear. In many animals including us, one notable difference is that it immediately tightens the muscles around the jaw in order to stop the jaw being broken in the expected confrontation. It also moves energy away from the digestive process to bodily strength. In our current example this means gripping hold more strongly of a food source.
Despite its reputation, irritation/anger is a much more discerning and considered adapter of other registers and bodily processes than apprehension/fear. The reason for this is that it has the lived space in which to act whereas apprehension/fear responds to a threat to life. For example in human violent encounters; individual to individual or group to group; a stronger register of anger over fear turns a threat to your life into a difficulty to be overcome. Let us take a second look at the description above of apprehension/fear at work. ‘When we cannot physically move away then the messenger shifts to its highest degree of fear in order to maximise the change in our body and muscles’. The fact, that the animal cannot physically move away also fills ‘difficulty perception’ and increases the strength of irritation/anger. The stronger that irritation/anger becomes, the more the animal switches to using its body/brain resources to tackling the difficulty. The message to your muscles and other registers is superficially comparable to the apprehension/fear emotion but the detail can be very different; more about body wide preparation to act rather than just a focus on whole body movement. Though human heroes are allowed to show some fear they must be strong, calm and considered in movement/actions when facing threats to ‘life’. In the context of our social biology a threat to our life can become a threat to the life of others. This calm considered fighting state can only be energised by anger. The dominance of difficulty over threat also benefits the inner and outer dialogues which move in the same direction i.e. ‘thinking’ is better in that it ranges more widely and is less fixated on the ‘object of fear’.
While an open display of irritation/anger within a group is seen as poor emotional control, as we have found, irritation/anger is in fact an energiser that has far better access to the brain/body than apprehension/fear. In reality what is actually happening in the group is that the display, or open use of irritation/anger, commonly makes others apprehensive/fearful or irritated/angry. They then experience the person as a threat or difficulty. An open display of apprehension/fear in a social animal such as humans is read very differently. It is read as vulnerability. This then triggers active rejection, ignoring or intimacy actions. The problem with irritation/anger is that it can lead the animal or group to underestimate threats. This weakness is underplayed in heroic stories, true or fictional, by lucky survival.
At first sight the distinction between threat perception- apprehension/fear and difficulty perception- irritation/anger looks subtle and not very significant, especially as functionally they have strong similarities. However, if we look at their existential starting points we would expect that small differences here would scale up to large differences in more highly evolved animals.
Does the removal of things that trigger apprehension/fear and irritation/anger lead to the quieting of these feelings? We are born with the same biological kit as the first members of our species. Biological registers do not give up that easily. The more that we try and starve them the more that they adapt their models to build on new sensory information. They also shift their range so that encounters that would once have triggered low level responses now trigger high level responses. What was once trivial becomes important. Consider how weakening the natural context for the immune system has led to auto-immune diseases. Compromising the natural context for apprehension/fear and irritation/anger also leads them to turn on other important aspects of our nature. Unhealthy internal conflicts in us can multiply. This goes beyond the obvious ones of increasing mental health problems. As we will see with satisfaction/happiness the reverse is also true. Feelings that we want to have more of adjust to satiation rather than starvation.
Emotions are not just feelings; thanks to their life modeling they are flexible ways of perceiving the world that balance each other out, particularly within a group context. The last point makes them vital for rich social co-operation. We see this most clearly in the deeply conflicted intimate co-operation of many couples who have spent decades living together.
So where does aggression fit in?
“The child we are worried about has been very aggressive in school. We have booked him in for an anger management program but we would like you to find out why he is angry”. Aggression is no more associated with irritation/anger than it is with apprehension/fear. The knowledge position on ‘aggression’ within individual human animals is that it can be accessed by many different processes and biological registers. This is really another way of saying that we do not know what aggression looks like within the individual. Aggression and its grammatical family of aggress and aggressive have as their core meaning a quality of quarreling (verbal fighting) and physical fighting. The ‘word’ only has meaning when referring to a quality of encounter therefore it requires two or more animals before it can refer to anything. It only has meaning in the social world. It has no meaning in the physical world.
Knowledge tells us that physical aggression and direct verbal aggression are more common in male humans than females. The word aggression however describes moving towards/causing quarrels and fights. When we look beyond the physicality we find that females are more likely than males to reject, exclude and traduce. Whichever of the two approaches is used, relationaly aggressive children report higher levels of loneliness, depression and isolation.
Time to smile! Reflecting on smiling opens an odd and interesting window on aggression. The popular knowledge picture goes something like this. Both humans and chimpanzees smile. When humans smile they are indicating that they are not threatening and do not see the other(s) as a difficulty i.e. they are not frightened and/or angry. When chimpanzees smile they mean the opposite i.e. they are frightened and/or angry and are prepared to fight. This is however another case of the looseness of language. The word smile describes a physical action that can be felt by the individual doing it and seen by others. It has a physical nature that can be described. If we bother to do this we find that chimpanzees do not smile. In preparing for a fight the muscles around the jaw are tightened to strengthen the jaw. The teeth are locked together. When humans smile they bare their teeth and show that their teeth are not locked together. There is always a small gap left between the two sets of teeth. When a Chimpanzee ‘smiles’ there is no gap left between the teeth and the message is ‘I have locked my teeth together to prepare to fight’. A human smiling with their teeth together is disconcerting and strange as is smiling while being physically or socially aggressive. Both of these are used by films to help create ‘nightmares’.
In order to understand emotion put the word aggression and all its dialogues on one side. Think instead of encounter and engagement.
How does our simple organism know when an encounter has stopped?
Disappointed/sad and satisfied/happy have the answer.
One or two of a particular animals registers, might know that a process, encounter or event has stopped but how does the whole animal know this? As we have shown this is not the role of the brain. The brain is not a control and command centre but a complex and sophisticated resolver of conflicts and a wizard modeler. There are two different ‘perceptual modeling biochemical messenger’ pairs that carry out this existential task. One is ‘disappointed/sad’ and the other is ‘satisfied/happy’. Needless to say one of them registers a negative outcome and the other a positive outcome. What decides that the outcome is positive or negative? Nothing does. It is resolved in the struggle between disappointed/sad and satisfied/happy. For both of these registers we need to look for their equivalents of threat and difficulty perception. I cannot think of more appropriate words than ‘loss perception’ for disappointed/sad and ‘beneficial perception’ for satisfied/happy. We can illustrate these best by first considering a simple animal, an ant, and then a version of a small animal in its den, a squirrel.
We are all familiar with the actions of ants. For illustration purposes we are going to temporally replace our simple animal body with an ant. This is not a scientific account of ant life but existentially true.
We can see ants working together to take to the nest ‘food’ that is much bigger than any one of them. Look out for members of the nest who are on scouting duties. These will be solitary ants beyond or outside of established routes. Sometimes you will see them come across food, a large breadcrumb or a dead fly for example. They climb all over it and if it is clearly too large for them they will return to the nest to get help. All ants have the same life modeling but some ants will be able to carry food that other ants won’t. Ants can be older, slightly compromised (injured in some way), have just eaten, possess different register levels or simply vary from each other. The flexibility of life models lying between the biological registers and whole animal actions allows for this as there are no exact specifications. If the life model was over specified there would be clear register points corresponding to portable and not portable. If ants live in a world where there is no exact specification then we would expect to see ants struggle not knowing whether or not they can carry the food back to the nest. This is what we see and it is fascinating to watch. It is possible to see an ant struggle for some minutes before it finally either gives up or succeeds. It is possible to see an ant give up followed some time later by another ant succeeding and staggering off with the prize.
What made the first ant give up and how did the second ant know that it had succeeded? In both cases it was an emotion but a different emotion in each case. The perception modeler for the first emotion is looking for evidence of loss. It will look for it all the time everywhere. We noted with threat perception that if it was the only emotion functioning everything would be frightening. If disappointed/sad was the only emotion functioning, everything would be perceived as loss. A melancholy character is someone whose loss perception is naturally stronger than their other emotional registers to the extent that they see loss where others do not.
An ant spends many minutes trying to find a way to carry a dead fly. It’s focus ‘energy’ could come from early biology around threat perception (not going back to the nest empty handed) or difficulty perception. As it struggles without succeeding the register of loss perception and the biochemistry of disappointed/sad grows in strength. When it gets stronger than any other emotion it takes over action and the ant stops struggling. It gives up and goes back to the nest feeling disappointed.
If it succeeds before disappointed/sad takes over from irritation/anger or apprehension/fear, and therefore before giving up, then it feels satisfied/happy. From the knowledge perspective, satisfied/happy is strongly related to the achievement of goals. In this case the ‘goal’ is embodied in the ant in the form of the ending of a movement model.
‘Beneficial perception’ processes anything from registers that could in any way be construed as being a benefit to the animal. For our ant, the emotional story begins with satisfied/happy when it finds the dead fly followed by experiences of apprehension/fear and irritation/anger as it struggles to pick up the fly ending with disappointed/sad when it gives up. This is the ‘sad’ ending. The ‘happy’ ending would be that it found a way to pick the fly up. Books for infants are full of simple stories of this kind, involving animals that mirror the feelings of the young children themselves. Exactly how things are for ants is a matter of science but ants also act as a simple model of the workings of existential principles that are necessarily embodied in ourselves and other animals.
We have said that the emotions are whole body registers that relate to many other registers in our brain/body. The squirrel’s actions allow us to illustrate this point.
Squirrels hide nuts and other seeds for winter. They dig small holes in the ground and cover them over. In the movement and action topic we can see that they would be using and creating integrated movement models to fix the location of the hidden food. Object points will be all over the models. These are live connections with episodic memory. The life models operating between episodic memory and movement models are complex and changing. A model built around moved distances containing what we would refer to as two trees, a number of thick shrubs and a small stream could contain episodic and layered movement models for events such as last year storage places, the area likely to be flooded, the place where there are berries at a specific time of year and the patch vulnerable to swooping large birds. The life modeling inclusion of episodic memory makes the movement model rich with not just visual mapping and imagery but with re-cognitions for all the senses. It is also rich in emotional registers. Like us, the squirrel moves through ever changing sensory and emotional weather. Like us, its constant mixed feelings are generated by the corresponding perception models working through the senses and also feeding on the activities of other registers. Like us, it can have feelings without being able to relate them to any objects. The emotions begin operating at register levels well below the condition required for there to be an object.
Squirrels store far more than they need. Lots of things can happen to the stores. Let’s imagine a squirrel digging at one of the nut/seed object spots on the relevant movement model. It is used to finding the nuts and seeds and it is also used to finding that they are not there. The squirrel will be apprehensive with growing irritation as digging continues. These feelings energise the models that control the actions. All the time it digs the intensity of the disappointed/sad emotion increases. If it finds the nuts/seeds then it feels satisfied/ happy and stops digging. There is no such thing as not finding them instead it stops when disappointment takes over from apprehension-irritation.
We often feel apprehension before we undertake a practical task with irritation added as we progress through it. Both then increase in proportion to their natural balance of strength in the given individual. Moments of satisfaction and disappointment are often marked by breaks. Apprehension and irritation can accelerate quickly into anxiety (fear) and frustration (anger) depending on how badly things are going. Running alongside this are social context processes and, unique to us, inner dialogues (thoughts). These have separate emotional weathers creating a three tier emotional complex that is a key player in both our physical and the social worlds.
The dominance of ‘loss perception’ over ‘beneficial perception’ produces the social observation of pessimism and the dominance of ‘beneficial perception’ over ‘loss perception’ produces the social observation of optimism. The classic, ‘is the glass half empty or half full’ captures this accurately so much so that it can be mirrored in our ‘simple animal body team’. Is the raided hole half empty or is it half full with what has been left behind? I look forward to meeting an optimistic squirrel.
In the complexity of the social world the above perspectives can be balanced out in the actions and judgments of two or more contrasting individuals acting together. Part of the world of shared attention.
We have passed through ‘happiness’ quickly. The ‘pursuit of happiness for all’ captures the scent of scientific humanism despite the fact that in the context of the physical world it amounts to the pursuit of something that is naturally short lived. In a sense ‘the pursuit of happiness’ does describe a deep fundamental. Every living organism is seeking beneficial outcomes. The biochemistry for feeling the emotion of satisfaction/happy is experienced as a rich content. Though by nature the briefest of emotions; except for social animals that are engaged in nurture and its derivatives; at low levels it is very frequent, marking the very smallest of beneficial endings for the tiniest of our efforts. From a purely individual perspective it is probably best pursued at a low register with deliberate thought reinforcement; ‘that made me satisfied/happy’. Only this way could it be a common, frequent experience. This is not true of the animal social world; particularly ours; where high registers of the beneficial emotion are fundamental to the very foundation of social registers. See the intimacy topics
At low levels of intensity the emotions are ever present and they are constantly updating the existential status of our models and memories i.e. the location and status of threats and difficulties and the location and status of loss and beneficial endings. The episodic memory is rich in them.
Interest/excitement (and surprise)
There is one more emotion. We cannot identify it using a particular word. There are three words that collectively point to it. The only one of these that our knowledge clearly identifies as one of the six biological emotions is surprise. Surprise is held to be the emotion that specialises in the unexpected. We can clearly see that there can often be an emotion that precedes the others. Something happens that is new, uncommon or otherwise unexpected to a degree that it grabs our focussed attention and sends a strong message around our brain/body for those registers and active models who can, to pause. We can point to the biological register, and therefore the experienced feeling, by using the word surprise but where and what is its perceptual processing model?
There is another word that points to the perceptual processing half of this emotion and it is the word interest. We understand the word interest to describe a quality of the way that our brain engages with what we sense and experience. Our brain cannot be ‘interested’ in anything outside of us without the emotion of interest. It can be engaged in a complex variety of ways but a relaxed calm examination is not one of them unless ‘interest’ is occupying focussed attention. You can learn as part of the ‘complex variety’ but at focussed attention levels interest is a patchy and often a weak feature. A truth constantly earthed over in ‘educating’ young humans.
Before we look at the perceptual detector behind interest we need to bring in the word excited. It is possible to experience high levels of interest for longer times than are given by the meaning (use) of the word surprise. We could leave ‘surprise’ on one side by summarising its core meaning cluster as ‘excited by the unexpected’ but we can also describe ‘interest’ as the emotion of very small frequent surprises. The emotion we are talking about now rapidly expands its territory becoming interest/excitement.
The word ‘unexpected’ can be rescued from its extreme use and be seen as pointing to wide-scale unpredictability in our experience and thereby providing a clue to the role of the emotion of interest/excitement. We have seen that variation and unpredictability is a constant in all our experiences so why have an emotion for it?
What is the perceptual detector behind the biochemistry of interest/excitement? Why is it there? What does it do? We can be fairly confident that our small animal, including the squirrel version, has the perceptual modeler and the biology for the emotion of interest. This is where we find the small babies propped up in high chairs with their heads in a fixed position. If anything proves that before speech and language we were dominated by vision it is these babies. They were captivated by what was in front of them. Researchers were trying to understand the development of visual perception. They would give the babies a display to look at. When the babies were looking at the display they concluded that their brains were taking in the details. When they were looking away they concluded that their brains had nothing to learn about the display providing, of course, that there were no identifiable distractors. As technology developed researchers could subtly change displays as the babies were looking and track in more detail the terms in which the babies were looking and not looking. Detailed knowledge of the development of visual perception was revealed and this in turn fed into aspects of artificial intelligence.
From the point of view of the parent present, what they saw was their baby being interested then losing interest. Sometimes the display change caused the babies to show the expression for the emotion of ‘surprise’ on their face shortly followed by crying. The vulnerability of babies is such that the too unexpected is ‘wired’ to crying to get care-giver help. This is clear evidence that the babies were feeling surprised. This also means that the babies were feeling interested and bored. There was an emotional process energising their engagement with the task. It was not energised by the development of a program, in artificial intelligence terms, or the development of visual modeling.
How have we moved from a world consisting only of encounters to one where we appear to know everything and are simply looking for changes?
The world we refer to is not stable or reliable enough. The world we mathematically model and observe by special actions (experiments) is too over specified, too exact and particular, to be absolutely predictable beyond the lifeless. In all moments of life i.e. existentially, all we are aware of living is the current dominant life models with the background noise of other life models and biological registers. We only live by using unpredictable life modeling and conflicted, complex and varied ways of registering encounters. Many of these registers are remarkable and natural life ‘sciences’. We can even live remarkable mathematics, as seen in sport. The life models do exist in our brain/body and they do adapt as a result of encounter/experience.
Any given life model prior to encounter is used for the encounter and in this sense only, predicts the outcome of the encounter. Any changes in the model as a result of the encounter are a result of unpredicted aspects of the encounter. Life could be seen as a struggle between the predictable and the unpredictable. It is at this esoteric point that we find the emotion of interest/excitement. What a gob stopping emotion it must be and indeed it is. From now on every time you read the word ‘interest’ think immediately of ‘lots of little surprises’. Note of caution, the meaning cluster for the use of the word interest includes other things like favourite activities for example.
We update life models as a consequence of actions but it would be a good idea if we updated all life models as much as possible at every opportunity. If we did this our model ‘predictions’ would be more reliable and we would have more beneficial outcomes. In other words we are more likely to stay alive long enough for ourselves or members of our group to breed.
The starting point for understanding interest/excitement is to begin with the role that all emotions play ‘underneath and outside’ of focussed attention. Apprehensions, annoyances (irritations), satisfactions and disappointments are part of the background chorus even when they have not grabbed the focus of attention. As we have noted emotions begin acting at a perceptual whole body level where they do not require objects. They therefore operate across registers as well as all object perception. At these levels they probably will not leave much of an accessible mark in episodic memory but it is often enough to colour a similar experience/episode. Some dislike, a feeling of re-assurance or an inclination to trust, maybe, next time you walk in that wood, pass that bench or meet that person.
What emotion updates the models that have little colour or presence but are vital to navigating the environment or identifying possible prey, or a new bakers in a moment when you are not hungry? What emotion deals with a very new, ‘out of place or time’ experience? What emotion can do the mundane and backroom work but at the same time be strong enough to command focussed attention when matters get confusing and before ‘threat’ and ‘difficulty’ muscle in? The simple perceptual model behind the bio-chemistry of the emotion of interest can be summed up in the question, is this unpredicted? As every detail of our lives carries ‘unprediction’ it is a busy emotion. We feel that ‘interest’ is always with us and so much part of our experience that it is a universal ‘expectation’ of being human rather than being about a quality of our ability to engage.
The ‘predictable’ has no or very low levels of the emotion of interest making the emotion limited in routine encounters. We notice this in our fully engaged lives and call it boredom. We use the word to refer to the absence of interest particularly in a context where other registers are also low i.e. relaxing. The unpredictable and the unexpected move the levels of the emotion of interest up through excitement until reaching the sudden extreme end which we refer to as surprise.
The idea of an emotion that specialises in the ‘unpredictable’, seems like a forced marriage between the abstract and the concrete. Firstly, our position is that embodied conflicted existential truths are the foundation and maintainer of life. Secondly, we can see this clearly with at least one emotion so the initial assumption should be that this is how all emotions operate. We started with the abstract ‘threat’ as the perceptual modeler for apprehension/fear. We found that ‘us’ and crayfish have the same feeling as we both have the same biological register. The word ‘threat’ became concrete because the details of what constitutes a threat to us and to a crayfish have nothing in common. We then found that we could only accurately refer to other emotions by using a serious of similarly abstract terms, ‘difficulty’, ‘loss’ and ‘benefit’. Each one has an animal biological messenger that is felt across the animal kingdom. Our last emotion has brought us to ‘unpredictable’ and to an emotion that we only think of as a feeling when excited or surprised. The key is not what we feel, the biology messenger itself, but the activities of the perceptual modeler that is directly linked to it. It is this that determines the strength of the emotion. It is the momentary strength of the emotion that then determines how it participates in the frighteningly complex moments of each deeply conflicted living animal.
Social emotions
We have seen above that the basic emotions function in the physical and social worlds. The social world is complex beyond description. We can only see bits and pieces and partial changes and movements. There are emotions that we feel and describe that are specifically social in nature. How do we understand their nature? Lets think of the emotions of pride and jealousy. All emotions can only be felt as basic emotions. The biological messenger of pride is satisfied/happy and the biological messenger of jealousy is irritation/anger. The perception modelings in which they are both felt are exclusively social. It is this that makes them social emotions.