- Form: The brain evolved to regulate the body. It does not make any clear distinction between thought and emotion; the circuitry for each is intertwined. Emotions aren't predetermined by particular brain structures, nor expressed in the same ways by all people (essentialism). Instead, the brain-body actively constructs emotions using past actions and experiences (constructionism).
- Function: Emotions can serve as "motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavors that prompt the detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies". This is analogous to the role of essential workers, who orient us toward social and ecological health by promoting generalized synchrony through basic service delivery. As social animals, human nervous systems evolved to regulate each other. The current rise in the prevalence of mental health disorders, reaching epidemic proportions in some cases, should alert us to the need for a serious conversation about the emotional climate of our culture, and bring greater awareness to the place of emotion within our daily lives, narratives, and dialogue.
- Action: Understanding how emotions are constructed widens our horizon of control and self-regulation. We can learn to distinguish between physical discomfort and affective distress with careful attention to our experiences, expectations, and beliefs. Bringing to mind a field of care in which practitioners are held and supported, and from which they can learn to hold and support others can help to establish affective resonance and naturally engage greater willpower and self-control.
We've previously connected the pursuit of social/ecological harmony with the ability to construct mental models. The events this year (most notable of which has been a global pandemic exacerbated by widespread disinformation) have served to highlight all too clearly that utilizing good models is necessary for effective pandemic response and identifying the universal basic services that must form the foundation of our increasingly planned (and undeniably global and interconnected) economy. Now let's connect models to emotional health; there are several reasons we must do this. As Baruch Spinoza pointed out, the mind and body are one, and therefore the proper subject of ethics is as much the physical world as it is the mental. Antonio Damasio has written extensively on both emotions and Spinoza. There is also a connection between Spinoza and Buddhism (and Nietzsche) via their mutual concern with ethics and the larger project of affective science: "Spinoza sought improvement of the mind not just as a theoretical exercise, but as a remedy against three ethical hindrances - the overvaluing of wealth, fame, and sensual pleasure." Interestingly, Emanuel Derman writes that he "once made an attempt, a weak one, to understand money using Spinoza's theory of the passions" in his white paper (A Stylized History of Quantitative Finance) he wrote:
"Spinoza developed a system of explaining and defining the passions in terms of their relation to three more primitive feelings: Pain, Pleasure, and Desire. Every passion or emotion, in his view, is a derivative of these three sensations, which lie beneath every passion that Spinoza can name. Thus Hate, for example, is the Pain associated with an external object or person, while Love is Pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause... Some passions have two underliers. Envy is Pain at someone else’s Pleasure, analogous to a convertible bond that depends on both equity and interest rates. Similarly, to give a more complex example, Spinoza regards Cruelty as the Desire to inflict Pain on Someone You Love, a triple derivatives analogous to a convertible bond that is additionally exposed to credit risk."
For Spinoza, the idea that we are separate, autonomous beings is a key target of his philosophical critique. He insists that we are all connected to one another. Spinoza speaks of the society common to all humans as a body with a collective identity: "We can wish for nothing more helpful to the preservation of our being than that we should so agree in all things that the Minds and Bodies of all would compose, as it were, one Mind and one Body; that all should strive together, as far as they can, to preserve their being; and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of all." (IVP18s) Einstein would've certainly been aware of these philosophical views when he famously said "I believe in Spinoza's God". Returning to Antonio Damasio on the subject of emotions and feelings and how these relate to morals and ethics (and thereby to social and ecological health), he opens his book, The Strange Order of Things, by noting that feelings "prompt the detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies", this clearly ties emotions and feelings to critical services and essential workers (paraphrasing):
Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavors... consider medicine, one of our most significant cultural enterprises. Medicine's combination of technology and science began as a response to the pain and suffering caused by diseases of every sort, as a consequence of specific feelings, including the compassion that may be born of empathy. Those motives remain today... Language, sociality, knowledge, and reason are the primary inventors, but feelings motivate. The interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition.
Tania Singer, a German psychologist and social neuroscientist, published "Compassion: Bridging Practice and Science", which combines contributions from many individuals. Diego Hangartner, one of the contributors, describes how "the desire to cultivate compassion is an integral part of one’s growth. By moving from self-centeredness to other-centeredness, one is able to more clearly see the world, recognize the condition of our existence, and lead away from suffering. In the Buddhist tradition, compassion is more focused on the causes and conditions that precede suffering rather than the suffering itself, because only by changing these can one can alter or prevent the resultant suffering." (As Evan Thompson noted in his book, the desire to understand and meet the basic needs of other people, and having a proper causal understanding of how to do this, isn't unique to Buddhism, but it is certainly necessary.) The volume closes with a quote from Shantideva (685-763): “All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.” (Bodhicaryavatara 8:129) In her article "Beyond Homo Economicus" described the connection between the existential threats we face and the faulty conceptions of human nature we hold. She recommends that corrective action requires returning to and realigning with a more accurate understanding:
"Humanity faces numerous global challenges, including climate change, resource depletion, financial crisis, deficient education, widespread poverty, and food insecurity. But despite the devastating consequences implied by a failure to address these issues, we have not risen to the occasion. The emphasis on individualism, selfishness, and materialism that prevails in Western societies ignores the vast amount of neuroscientific evidence suggesting that humans are capable of far more. People are wired for affective resonance, for naturally reflecting each other’s emotions and motivational states. Indeed, humans are often driven to help those in need, even complete strangers, by feelings of empathy and compassion. Institutional reform could be aimed at adapting social environments to foster cooperation instead of competition, and to activate our motivation to engage in caring behavior, rather than seeking achievement, power, and status only. In the long run, striving only for the latter leads to imbalance and resource depletion, not only on the individual level, but also globally. Rather than continuing to indulge the most destructive drivers of human behavior, global leaders should work to develop sustainable, equitable, and caring political systems, economies, and societies that encourage individuals to meet their full socio-emotional and cognitive potentials – and thus, to create a world in which we all want to live."
In earlier posts I described Karl Friston's work modeling cognitive processes, with the implications that dysfunctional modeling can lead to various psychopathologies. We can generalize this in a sense, that poor modeling that occurs at the cultural level can contribute to dysfunctional social processes (whether this might contribute to the fall of civilizations is a topic for further study). I mention this in connection with Damasio's statement above because it bears noting that even among the most prosperous nations today, mental health has remained a major problem. Drug addiction, suicide, domestic violence, depression and anxiety, and many other problems remain a major concern. These are certainly connected to the ability to meet basic needs, but at a very fundamental level this is also about emotional health and our ability to understand and work with our feelings. The causes of this situation are not always straightforward. For example, Wendy Wheeler (whose writing on the subject of biosemiotics was featured earlier) references Damasio in her book "The Whole Creature": "feelings are an essential part of rational behavior. When the neural pathways between the amygdala (the site of our affective responses) and the language processing neo-cortex are damaged, but the latter isn't, people can calculate and calculate, but they can't make choices, and their sociality is blighted." Unable to make decisions, such people cannot act in the face of clear and present need. Action, when it comes, is often the result of external compulsion, rather than internal resolution. Despite possessing an overabundance of information, our society still lacks a sufficient understanding of emotional health as a prosocial motive force that would enable it to realize the greater prosperity, for all, that Spinoza so passionately argued for.
The "map of the emotions", created by Emanuel Derman and based on Spinoza's Ethics, is very interesting, though certainly one could improve upon it. Perhaps overlying additional ethical frameworks, such as B. Alan Wallace's chart of the brahmavihārās, which are moral and spiritual qualities used within the bodhisattva model for cultivating bodhicitta.1 In his book "The Four Immeasurables", Wallace writes "Insofar as we take into account the well-being of others, their sorrows and joys, and the fact that every sentient being wishes for happiness just as we do - insofar as we start to live this, it becomes our reality. This is not self-negation, but rather self-contextualization; we exist in interrelationship." We could also include Timothy Taylor's description of the ethics of care that values shared human capacities. These and other maps and models can provide valuable supplemental material to help us to understand our feelings, a side of humanity that is all too often pushed aside. People tend to ignore that which they do not understand. But regardless of how we eventually do it, we need to bring a greater awareness to our emotions and feelings and acknowledge the prominent place they have within our daily lives, narratives, and dialogue.
In the book "Destructive Emotions" (2003), which is described as "a scientific dialogue with the Dalai Lama, narrated by Daniel Goleman" there is an interesting section on page 158 where it is noted that there is no Tibetan equivalent for the English term "emotion". The Dalai Lama said "My conjecture, in terms of trying to understand why the West places such a strong emphasis on identifying emotion, is that, going back to the Enlightenment, even as far back as Aquinas, there is an enormous priority placed on reason and intelligence. What can impede reason? Emotion. These two categories are set in opposition to each other." Emotion was therefore primarily defined as anything that is unreasonable or irrational. The Dalai Lama is likely correct on this matter. The brain does not make any clean distinction between thought and emotion. The circuitry for emotion and for cognition are intertwined - just as Buddhism posits that these two elements are inseparably integrated. This is consistent with Lisa Feldman Barrett's "Theory of Constructed Emotion" (see below), and inconsistent with Jaak Panksepp's more essentialist position on emotion.
What is love?
Susan Sontag wrote, “Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.” Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote: "As soon as we can give a reason for a feeling we are no longer under the spell of it; we appreciate, we weigh, we are free, at least in principle. Once the mystery gone, the power goes with it. Love must always seem to us indivisible, insoluble, superior to all analysis, if it is to preserve that appearance of infinity, of something supernatural and miraculous, which makes its chief beauty. The majority of beings despise what they understand, and bow only before the inexplicable." But here, let us try to explore the emotion of love.
In "Matter and Desire", Andreas Weber notes that the Western concept of love thinks of it as a sort of deficit, "a longing for something you do not yet own", a concept "born from the thinking of possession, the desirous search for that which I do not have". In "Love 2.0", psychologist Barbara Fredrickson cautions against this solipsistic view of love common in the individualistic cultures of the West, and says that love is, in fact, "positivity resonance", a connection in which you come into synchrony with another: "Love is a momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. You come to your interactions with a well-developed understanding of each other’s inner workings, and you use that privileged knowledge thoughtfully, for each other’s benefit. More than any other emotion, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see them, wholeheartedly — springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself." Fredrickson has been soundly criticized for her metaphor of "positivity", particularly that there is an optimal "positivity ratio", but the metaphor of resonance may stand on firmer theoretical ground. Ursula Le Guin, in "The Wave in the Mind", describes these relationships of profound mutuality: "Like two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment — getting in sync. Consider deliberately sychronised actions like singing, chanting, rowing, marching, dancing, playing music; consider sexual rhythms (courtship and foreplay are devices for getting into sync). Consider how the infant and the mother are linked: the milk comes before the baby cries. Consider the fact that women who live together tend to get onto the same menstrual cycle. We entrain one another all the time."
Lisa Feldman Barrett has noted that as social animals, human nervous systems evolved to regulate each other. We hear of people who have died of a broken heart; people who, once bound so tightly together, can no longer be separated without causing harm to one or both. As Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote, a heart may be taught to lean upon another "till it is no longer sufficient for itself." Fredrickson described love as a kind of resonance, coherence, or complimentarity between embodied agents in a way not unlike Karl Friston has when referring to the coupled agent-environment relationship. We see the social aspects of this form of love articulated by Tolstoy (Gandhi, MLK, and Thich Nhat Hanh) and Erich Fromm, who in "The Sane Society" wrote: "Man can protect himself from the consequences of his own madness only by creating a sane society which conforms with the needs of man, needs which are rooted in the very conditions of his existence. A society in which man relates to man lovingly, in which he is rooted in bonds of brotherliness and solidarity, rather than in the ties of blood and soil." In Political Emotions, Martha Nussbaum places love at the center of our
civic universe: "All of the core emotions that sustain a decent society
have their roots in, or are forms of, love." As she writes: "Ceding the terrain of emotion-shaping to antiliberal forces gives them a
huge advantage in the people’s hearts and risks making people think of
liberal values as tepid and boring... In the type
of liberal society that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for
all, there are two tasks for the political cultivation of emotion. One
is to engender and sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that
require effort and sacrifice. The other is to keep at bay forces that
lurk in all societies and, ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to
protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others." Many have noted that politically progressive voices, in the main, have ceded this terrain. (Not all, but too many.) Racism, sexism, tribalism, fascism... all would suffocate and whither if deprived of the oxygen of emotion. But if that’s true, then why are Democrats apparently less effective when it comes to emotion-shaping? Perhaps it’s the Dunning–Kruger effect: people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. Trump wins among many voters who have a superficial understanding of issues (like abortion, guns, public health, etc). This low ability translates into greater certitude, which comes with greater emotional expression, unity of purpose, and tenacity in the face of opposition. As if to underscore this, Michael Hobbes said “Just once in my lifetime, I would like to have Democratic representatives with the same weasel relentlessness about enacting their agenda as Republicans.”
In "Escape from Freedom", German humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm wrote, "The dynamic quality of love lies in this very polarity: that it springs from the need of overcoming separateness, that it leads to oneness — and yet that individuality is not eliminated. The basic dichotomy that is inherent in freedom — the birth of individuality and the pain of aloneness — is dissolved on a higher plane." According to Boonstra and Slagter, who write, "This contradiction — tension internalized — is at the center of Friston’s anticipatory organism and grounds the perpetual process of free energy minimization." Tolstoy, in his correspondence with Gandhi, one of Dr. King’s great influences, wrote “Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills”, and in "War and Peace", wrote "Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone."
In "How to Love" Thich Nhat Hanh writes: "We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that their suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is their happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering. When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help them to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of their suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if they don’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love... If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like?" Matthew Abrahams, in "I am racist, I vow to end racism" wrote: "While compassion is cultivated on the
individual level, it is not fully realized until one is wise enough to
see the complex web of interconnected causes and effects that lead to
suffering". In "The Drama of Love and Death" Edward Carpenter wrote: "understanding of the person one lives with must be cultivated to the last degree possible, because it is a condition of any real and permanent alliance".
On the topic of families generally, Wendell Berry said: "Marriage too is an attempt to rhyme, to bring two different lives within the one life of their troth and household - periodically into agreement or consent. The two lives stray apart necessarily, and by consent come together again: to “feel together,” to “be of the same mind.” The work of poetic form is coherence, joining things... to resonate with each other." Deborah Blum wrote about the research of Harry Harlow: "What attachment theory [see this in "Sustainable Compassion Training" below] essentially says is that being loved matters — and, more than that, it matters who loves us and whom we love in return. We take for granted now that parents should hug their children, that relationships are worth the time, that taking care of each other is part of the good life. At the end, in Harry Harlow’s handiwork, there’s nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it’s a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live." We have to learn it, according to Rainer Maria Rilke. "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."
Misinformation: Emotional Manipulation and Responsibilization
Recently it was noted by a Facebook executive that right-wing populism speaks to "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion" and is better at connecting with people on a visceral level. "That was there in the 1930's; that's not invented by social media — you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, they’re not created by social media. It's why tabloids do better than the Financial Times. People respond to engaging emotion." Facebook claims that individuals are responsible for being skeptical content consumers capable of rationally evaluating content and managing their emotional response to information. Also, organizations are responsible for creating emotionally engaging content if they want to increase traffic and shared posts. This is all good advice, and it has the added advantage of conveniently leaving Facebook off the hook. All they are responsible for is hosting the content and raking in the money spent by advertisers, a nice arrangement for maximizing revenue while sidestepping legal liability.
Unfortunately this does little to address the post-truth politics and cultural polarization that is ascendant in many nations and correlated with increased use of some forms of social media. Many observers of the relationship between media and society, including Joe Biden, suggest that rising conflicts may be more a consequence of poor policy design and regulatory failure, and in particular Section 230 protections that shield Facebook and other internet companies from liability. As he told The New York Times editorial board last year, “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem. Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked.” The question is: what is the relative amount of responsibility that should be held by all parties? How much should individual social media users and organizations that generate content have, on the one hand, and social media platforms who host and moderate the content have, on the other? This highlights the phenomenon of "responsibilization" - when the burden of liability is consciously shifted to the users.
As Yogi Hendlin noted, responsibilization is a tool we've also seen used before by fossil fuel corporations, "displacing their responsibility as producers and marketers of unhealthy things and ideas and instead shaming overly-indulgent consumers". This is because, if only consumers share equally in the blame, and if we can be convinced to seek only individual solutions, then producers can continue with business as usual, and the structures and organizations within society that have enabled and protected these agents of environmental harm will remain intact thereby preserving them whole. Just as making fossil fuel corporations legally liable for the damage their products have caused would create significant changes, revoking Section 230 protections could be an enormous blow to Facebook's business model. They have very big financial reasons to resist accepting responsibility, and so "overly emotional" users and "underly emotional" purveyors of factual content become the convenient scapegoats. This narrative framing used by Facebook and Zuckerberg is motivated by the desire for profit and power encouraged by a broken economy, where maintaining dominant control in the data ecosystem is all important, and increasing short term market gains without concern for long term consequences is the status quo.
But we can set aside the "greed is good" mantra of the marketplace and focus solely on the dubious ethical justification of responsibilization, because it fails spectacularly. People universally recognize that in any interaction, greater responsibility always lies with those who have a better understanding about the consequences of their actions and a greater ability to intervene accordingly (this is why adults are held responsible while minors are more often given a pass). In the case of Facebook, the company has a very deep understanding (a detailed social graph for every user) and ability (all those secret newsfeed algorithms). They certainly know more than the average user of their media platform about how it works and what it can do to us. As Tristan Harris put it "there's basically a supercomputer pointing at your brain, playing chess against your mind, and it's going to win a lot more often than not." Should we really be giving politically powerful social network corporations, who operate enormously capable supercomputers, a virtually free pass, or should we be able to hold them liable for how they use their newsfeed algorithms and social influence? Succinctly put: social media platforms have proven they are more than capable of establishing generalized synchrony with users (they know your preferences), and implementing new prior preferences in users' generative models (allowing information with little regard for factual content in newsfeeds) to steer the emotional synchrony to a specific desired state (often more dogmatic or radical than before) that drives cultural polarization and undermines transpartisan standards of evidence or reasoning.
A brief discursion into semiotics
John Deely said "Humans have learned that our relations involve us in the whole of Gaia, not just in the human socio-cultural sphere." And so, we've come up with many different "spheres" to conceptualize the integrated, holistic qualities of nature: lithosphere, biosphere, ecosphere, noosphere (or semiosphere, cognisphere). These correspond to earth, life, ecology, mind, (meaning, thought). Susan Petrilli, writing about the intersection between semiotics and ethics, said: "Semioethics returns to the origin of semiotics understood as “medical sem(e)iotics” or “symptomatology” and, recalling its ancient vocation to care for life, thematizes the relation between signs and values, semiotics and axiology, semiotics, ethics and pragmatism." The connection between semiotics, medicine, and ethics is particularly important. But where's the motive force? Where does caring come from?
We need to understand that the semiosphere, the sphere of meaning, is probably best described through the discipline of affective science. Most meaning is not conscious, but regulated by "emotional" processes, though emotion may not be the right term to use given it's cultural relativity. Affective feeling is constructed as emotions, an integral part of our conceptual thought, and perhaps forms the greater content of the global semiosphere, a "sphere of affect". If we are going to connect our hearts to our heads, and our heads to our hands, and address the chronic mental afflictions plaguing society (and indeed we must!), then we will need the language to describe how to do that. Jobs without meaning are psychologically destructive and cause societal harm, as Marx's theory of alienation surmised and David Graeber, in his book “Bullshit Jobs“ confirms. If we are to connect hearts to hands then the dynamics of harmony/conflict (or concord/discord) that shape ecological processes must be understood. Here the essential work is promoting social harmony, delivering critical services, developing our roles, and consistently orienting us toward social and ecological health. Understanding affect and emotional health is key to working with these processes.
Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard provides what might possibly be botanical evidence for a global sphere of affect: "More and more researchers are studying emotions. Is there also emotion in plants? It comes down to language, and to how we apply this language when we look at these responses in plants. Let’s say you have a group of plants and stress one out, it will have a big response. Botanists can measure their serotonin responses. They have serotonin. They also have glutamate, which is one of our own neurotransmitters. There’s a ton of it in plants. They have these responses immediately. If we clip their leaves or put a bunch of bugs on them, all that neurochemistry changes. They start sending messages really fast to their neighbors. Is that an emotional response? It’s certainly trying to save itself. It upregulates. Its genes respond. It starts producing these chemicals. How is that different than us all of a sudden producing a whole bunch of norepinephrine?" This reminds me of Eduardo Kohn's "How Forests Think". Interestingly, although he challenges many dualistic assumptions, the thought/emotion dualism isn't directly addressed, though he'd certainly agree it is an artificial distinction.
Andreas Weber, a biosemiotician who studied under Francisco Varela, describes ecology as a relational system (see Robert Rosen's similar "relational biology") and writes about environmental topics from a 4E perspective that verges on panpsychism/ posthumanism, and the emotional essentialism of Jaak Panksepp. He gave a nod to Eduardo Kohn's book "How Forests Think" when he suggested that, moreso than cognition, ecosystems are imbued with emotional affect. In his article about the conditions of the 2020 pandemic, he points out that reciprocity - actively sharing within a productive biosphere - is the defining property of an intimate and emotionally involved relationship. "We can experience ourselves as sources as well as recipients of productivity." Elsewhere in "Biology of Wonder" he writes "the whole biosphere lends itself to emotional resonance". Emotions have long been culturally synonymous with all things yin (from the yin and yang of Chinese philosophy). Yin is associated with water, earth, the moon, and femininity. Cultural awareness of the importance of emotions has been on the rise, as can be seen in the concerted literary effort by writers like Weber. He prefers to use metaphors drawing on the physicality of sensations and the eroticism of life and reproduction, to point out how the felt sense connects us to our shared biosphere and experience of life.
Returning to "Biology of Wonder", Weber writes: "Emotional experience is central to the conception of an ecological commons and ethics. If a living being participates in the exchange processes of an ecosystem, which integrates agents with each other and the whole they build up, it also gets emotionally involved. This emotional dimension is how living beings experience the relevance of their connections. To be connected, to be in metabolism, is always an existential engagement, and this echoes as feeling. Feeling is, so to speak, the core of a commons ethic. It symbolizes how well the mutual realization of individuality and the whole are achieved. Participating in a commons of this kind for a human means to fully realize their ecological potential and to experience this realization through the feeling of living a full life. Love is the only conceivable relation in which egoism and altruism can achieve a balance because one is only possible through the other. It is our love for the other which makes us grow, strengthens us, and lets us be ourselves. The possibility of this love grants us humanity."
The notion of "essential workers" deserves our deep attention during this unfolding pandemic. In that context, some great thinkers like Ian Gough, Peter Corning, and Andrew Percy have been matching the notion of "basic needs" with the emerging national discussion about Universal Basic Services (UBS). And appropriately so, as that seems to be what essential work/ critical services are all about (another new idea, that of Partnerism, is gaining attention). Essential work in the service of meeting our basic needs depends upon prosocial ethics, values, and emotions. Grappling with the neglected emotional health of our culture, which has been externalized as just more collateral damage in an out of control consumer economy, is now necessary. In her book "How Emotions are Made", Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the theory of "constructed emotion", wherein the brain constructs emotions using past actions and experiences, and affect isn't predetermined by particular brain structures, nor expressed in the same ways by all people. In light of this theory, the idea of "Gross National Happiness", which was instituted as the goal of the government of Bhutan, would be problematic to accurately assess. And the World Happiness Report, which has consistently ranked Denmark among the top three happiest of 155 countries, may be somewhat misleading. But there are some other implications that are very promising. For example, it is possible to influence one's emotional life by intervening in one's experiential content. According to her, this is the path to a "healthier body and more potent life". In 2016 Barrett published "The Theory of Constructed Emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization", which illuminated the many correspondences it has with research conducted by Karl Friston and others into active inference. (This wasn't a connection I had initially anticipated.) As she describes, "The theory I've introduced makes it clear that we’re a social species, which means we regulate each others' nervous systems. I can make your heart rate speed up or slow down, just by my choice of words. So I think we’re affecting brain development in a way that's going to impact society. The emotional climate of a culture is something we should be having serious conversations about." She recently elaborated:
"The brain evolved to regulate your body, so there's actually no fundamental difference biologically between a mental illness and a physical illness. And since we're social animals, human nervous systems also evolved to regulate each other. We have lots of ways that we affect the nervous system of another person. Treating other people with a certain degree of human dignity and kindness, and having them treat you in the same way is actually really helpful physically and biologically. That's what the data shows. If you're swimming in a sea of conflict all the time it's not good for your physical health. Consider the degree of animosity and casual brutality that we see in the media. People think of the decrease in civility as a social problem, but it's actually a public health problem too. One thing we can do is make good social connections to other people and generally just be kinder to each other."
It's worth noting that many researchers, when faced with the overabundance of information in contemporary society and the effects this has on the emotional climate of our culture, have shifted their attention toward contemplative practices. Barrett described the importance of these practices for regulating emotional health, feeling more subtle emotions, and distinguishing between distress and discomfort: "This is partly why mindfulness meditation is so useful to people who have chronic pain — it lets you separate out the physical discomfort from the distress. Understanding how emotions are constructed widens the horizon of control. You realize that if your brain is using your past to construct your present, you can invest energy in the present to cultivate new experiences that then become the seeds for your future. You can cultivate or curate experiences in the now and then, if you practice them, they become automated enough that your brain will automatically construct them in the future.”
In "The Four Immeasurables", Wallace gave the subject of samatha and vipassana, the Tibetan approaches to concentration and insight, as much attention as the title subject. Given the theory of constructed emotion, and the implication that emotions can be controlled through cultivating greater awareness of one's experiential content, it should be clear why he would spend as much time on that as he did. Both Barrett and Wallace describe a narrative of personal empowerment by understanding and intervening in mind-body interactions. And as both Friston and Barrett have noted, the mind has a propensity to make predictions and ensure those predictions come to pass. “This [idea of expectation-based bodily response] is an evolved mechanism that allows us to capitalize on untapped resources at critical points in our existence,” Christopher Beedie says. The chemistry of expectation and belief is also the world of placebo, which is the effect of one’s beliefs on their body. These effects are chemical, employing things like dopamine, endogenous opioids, serotonin, and other chemicals your brain keeps on hand in case it needs to adjust what’s happening in the body. (These ideas have far more in common with cognitive behavioral therapy and the army method to help soldiers fall asleep than they do with Ronda Byrne's "law of attraction" pop psychology, also dubbed "confirmation-bias-with-good-intentions". For more on this, listen to "Bit of a Tangent" podcast, episode 29, "Predictive Processing 2" (beginning near minute 30), where Gianluca and Jared discuss this in detail.) In his book, Suggestible You, Erik Vance talked to scientists around the world who investigate placebos, internal pharmacies, hypnosis, and the power of belief on the body and mind. One of his favorite quotes came from Alia Crum, a psychologist at Stanford. “I don’t think the power of mind is limitless,” she said. “But I do think we don’t yet know where those limits are.”
Tibetan monks are famously known to practice a sort of meditation call “tummo” (associated with the monk Naropa, Tibetan Buddhism, Tantric meditation, and Kundalini Yoga) in which they can raise their body temperature, especially that of hands and feet, to the point where they can stay outside in the cold, even drying wet sheets draped over their bodies. Today Dutchman Wim Hof has gained worldwide attention for his exceptional endurance in extreme cold using similar methods. The science may not yet be entirely clear, but controlling physiological states through greater awareness and conscious regulation of the affective quality of expectations and beliefs has been demonstrated. And it's not just Tibetan monks and eccentric Dutchmen, but also essential workers who are daily "constructing" their emotions and harnessing internal pharmacies, because they understand, and believe in, the value of their work for the common advantage of all.
Evan Thompson, in his book "Why I Am Not a Buddhist" makes important observations that seek to inspire an honest look at what Buddhism can contribute to our modern world. He notes that the most radical ideas within Buddhism "challenge our narcissism, cultural complacency, and scientific triumphalism" (85, 189). As Kwame Anthony Appiah pointed out "the methods of the natural sciences have not led to the kind of progress in our understanding of values that they have led to in our grasp of facts" (187). In regard to the "radical critique of our narcissistic preoccupation", Thompson notes that mindfulness isn't ethically neutral, it "requires self-restraint and concern for the welfare of others", it's incompatible with greed (119), and makes use of social cognitive skills (138). Cognitive science shows us that "the self is a construction" not an illusion (89), and even "love depends on cultural conceptions" (159). This agrees with many constructivist theories, including those of Lisa Feldman Barrett. "According to phenomenologists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we habitually experience ourselves as living bodily subjects dynamically attuned to the world" (109). He quotes Randall Beer in support: "behavior is a property of the entire coupled brain-body-environment system" (132). The notion of generating attunement within cognitive ecosystems (134) is central to theories proposed by Barrett, Friston, and many other researchers within the fields of neuroscience. Throughout his book, Thompson notes how these and other ideas should be able to usefully inform an engaged conversation between Buddhism and science.
I also read Lisa Feldman Barrett's book "How Emotions Are Made", and particularly enjoyed chapters eight, "A New View of Human Nature" and the next chapter, "Mastering Your Emotions". Also notable is her chapter "Emotion and the Law" where she points out how affective realism and concealed carry laws can be a dangerous combination, and how bullying is a more serious problem than most of us realize. The main ideas center around a description of how all brains must efficiently ensure resources for physiological systems within the body (i.e. the internal milieu) so that an animal can grow, survive and reproduce (i.e. allostasis). This "body budget" exerts a strong influence on our affective state and is the source of many sensations that we interpret as emotion. As a result, Barrett emphasizes the importance of food (when not used as an opiate), exercise, sleep, and physical surroundings to help keep our body budget in balance. Our social reality also influences us significantly, and she mentions the importance of friends, pets, hobbies, reading, taking walks, massage, yoga, meditation, and cultivating a sense of awe. But we all know that there are many times when these are out of balance. And when that happens it helps to be able to distinguish between physical discomfort and affective distress. We can do this with a better understanding of emotional granularity, and the knowledge of how we construct and deconstruct emotions, and even our sense of self. (Incidentally, these ideas are also central to Buddhism.) Just as essentialism is incorrect when applied to emotions, it is likewise incorrect when applied to the self. Pain (chronic and acute), stress, and mental disorders (such as anxiety and depression, etc.) are, like emotions, not essentialist. Barrett is the chief proponent of the "theory of constructed emotion", and the book's overall message is that we need to move our perspective from realism/essentialism to constructionism, not just in relation to emotion, but in many other areas as well. Here the parallels to Buddhism are clear: though not labeled as such, Barrett's book shows in great detail how we can cultivate/construct "bodhicitta", as individuals and as a culture, and offers insight into why this is important today.
David DeSteno and Emotional Success
David DeSteno gave a talk about the role of emotions for individual and social health, particularly long term well being. In contrast to the assumption that emotional, as opposed to rational, approaches to making choices leads to impulsivity, DeSteno points out that "Emotions aren't the problem. Emotions don't always lead to impatience. Gratitude, compassion, and an authentic feeling of pride actually set the expectation for what you do next, even if it's not related to what you're thinking about in the moment." He singles out these three emotions for their beneficial effects. "A lot of Buddhism is about detachment from desire. A friend of mine who is a high ranking Buddhist lama told me that when monks first take their vows to be chaste, and to not gamble and to not drink, they fail a lot, just like the rest of us, because they're relying on willpower to do it. But over time through meditation, it begins to unleash this feeling of compassion in them. And when they feel compassion, suddenly it becomes very easy. Suddenly the temptations fall away. Now, if you read "The New York Times" or "The Atlantic," you're going to hear that meditation does all these great things for you. It lowers your blood pressure. It increases your creativity, increases your memory. All of those are true. But that's not why it was created. It was created basically to help end suffering, both for yourself and for other people, to make people more altruistic." The three emotions that DeSteno singles out can actually be seen to
correspond with the first three brahmavihārās: compassion is, of course,
compassion; gratitude is a form of loving-kindness in which we see the
good qualities in others; and pride is a form of sympathetic joy that is
directed at oneself. These three emotions can also be described using
modeling frameworks (like active inference): compassion is the desire to
improve models, gratitude is the recognition of good qualities in other
models, and pride is recognition of the good qualities of one's own
models. Extending the model analogy a bit further, when we feel compassion and desire to improve other models we must recognize that we are as role models. So to encourage others to, for example, embody cardinal virtues like prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice, we must exercise these as well.
"When people more often feel compassion, both for others and themselves, it has been tied to better performance on the job and in school, more exercise, healthier eating, lower consumerism, and less tobacco and alcohol use. We're seeing that the more often you experience these emotions it leads to greater self-control. There was a study done looking at a team's success in the workplace. And they thought, well, what's going to account for team success? And they thought, well, technical expertise, especially of the manager. Turned out that wasn't the biggest predictor. The biggest predictor was, was there a culture of empathy on the team? That is, could people trust each other? Did they feel they could support each other? Did the manager instill in the team a culture where it was OK and expected that we would talk about problems that we were having and share with each other? And to the extent that they did, those teams succeeded.
"How do you cultivate these feelings? You can do gratitude journaling or gratitude diaries. Take five minutes a day, every other day, and think about something you're grateful for. The trick, of course, is we all have three or four things that we're immensely grateful for. But if you think about the same three or four things every day, they're going to lose their power. It doesn't have to be something that's amazing. Even mild levels of gratitude do the same thing. Don't take pride only in ultimately reaching your goal, because that's a long time away. Take pride in each little step along the way. Don't engage in self-criticism for not getting there sooner. Have pride and self-compassion for yourself along the way. Those are some easy strategies to do. Using these pro-social emotions actually addresses another big problem of modern life, which is the plague of loneliness. So by cultivating these emotions, they not only help you achieve your own goals, they help you automatically build a social network around you."
Love is cultivated through care and attention. Attention informs us how to care, whether that is providing aid, or responding with compassion, playfulness or some other way. In my experience, it is always easier to work when I work to help others, and harder to work if the benefit is solely my own. The difference, according to DeSteno, is that such feelings as compassion that arise when we work in the service of others naturally engage our willpower and self-control. Naturally, we might say, because these prosocial emotions were selected for over the course of human evolution, since cooperation conveys enormous survival benefits. In contrast, when we work solely for our own benefit, it is not as rewarding of an experience to us and we are more likely to give up or procrastinate, because working in isolation for personal benefit alone is in opposition to our natural inclination to work together for mutual gain.
Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT)
In "Compassion for Self versus Other", Quaglia et al write that compassion training, from a Buddhist perspective, requires the practitioner to overcome and heal divisions between notions of self and others, both actually and conceptually, as these dualistic perceptions divide the world and misrepresent our essential interconnectedness." Building on this notion, in a paper titled "Recovering the Relational Starting Point of Compassion Training", Condon and Makransky write: "It has been proposed that the cultivation of compassion through meditation training could help address many problems, including burnout in human service and healthcare, prejudice and discrimination, and the ongoing ecological crisis." This could be a significant asset when providing universal basic services. However the authors caution that "If meditation techniques continue to proliferate without a relational starting point, we expect people will struggle to cultivate increasingly inclusive, unconditional and sustainable compassion. Relationality is the starting point for humans, and it remains a fundamental need throughout life... practitioners are an extension of a field of care in which they are held,
and from which they hold and support others: to love others as they are loved, to know others as they are known, to hold others in the wisdom and compassion in which they are held by their spiritual community. One experiences oneself as part of a larger, interconnected field, yielding psychological resilience and well-being that emerges from self-transcendent experiences such as awe, common humanity, and humility. Compassion flows from others to self, self to self, and self to other." Condon writes "This
relational starting point promotes resilience and connectivity, and
bolsters the psychological and social resources we need today to
confront systemic injustice... the person meditating learns to become an
extension of that field of love and compassion in which they are held,
by progressively extending love and compassion to others."
This paper was then discussed in a separate article, "Sustainable Compassion Training", published this month. The same authors write: “Traditional meditation is situated in communal frameworks of support for broad ethical horizons, which may be crucial for developing mindful awareness, wisdom, and compassion. These meditators experience themselves and their world as held within the unwavering support of their spiritual benefactors [Buddhas, bodhisattvas, teachers, and other accomplished practitioners], which empowers them, like their spiritual benefactors, to extend increasingly unconditional, inclusive, and sustainable care to others." It's not the specific members of this spiritual community of support that are important, rather it is that there is a community of support. They continue, "We have called this pattern of practice the relational starting point for meditation. This pattern of practice mirrors both the basic framework for cultivating all-inclusive love and compassion found in many of the world’s spiritual traditions and the kinds of patterns of human emotional development that are described in attachment and social baseline theories."
Why is a relational starting point important for extending compassion? "SCT begins not with self-care or extending care, but with receiving care by constructing a relational field in which one is held in the unconditional love of caring connection, benefactors, and/or ancestors. This mirrors the pattern of emotional development in attachment theory, and aligns with Social Baseline Theory, which suggests that the presence of supportive others enhances emotion regulatory capacities. The relational pattern of SCT also accords with theories of enactive cognition, which suggest that cognitive capacities are embedded in larger cultural and social contexts. [According to Esther Sternberg, “cradled, rooted, connected” are words social psychologists have used to describe the sense of embeddedness, that powerful forces beyond our bodies link us to others. "The emotions they evoke are among the greatest forces that affect our hormonal, our nerve chemical, and our immune responses."] SCT aligns with enactive cognition by embedding its participants in communities of practice that support them in the inevitable challenges they face when attempting to cultivate more unconditional and inclusive compassion for self and others. Practitioners within practice communities can scaffold on mature practitioners who have experienced and overcome similar challenges."
"According to attachment theory, one description of security is autonomy within relatedness, suggesting that one feels the support from which to explore and navigate the world on one’s own with the confidence that, if one becomes distressed, there is a secure base to return to. A core of security includes a strong felt sense of basic safety, comfort with, and curiosity about the world, together with the trust and vulnerability to return the sources of security as needed. Young children are dependent on attachment figures, and gradually, responsive and sensitive caregivers encourage the children’s autonomy. But even so called “secure” adults can have traces of insecurity from diverse relationship contexts, and thus are never fully and always “secure.” They will always continue to depend on support from others. In that way, people with security are able to comfortably navigate back and forth between autonomy and relatedness. This pathway to security leads to an increasing realization of an unlimited secure base in one’s fundamental awareness and its caring qualities... SCT also adds to the Theory of Constructed Emotion by establishing a “holding environment”, a space in which emotions are not elaborated on, ruminated about, or responded to. Here the process of constructing an emotion can relax within the space of compassionate awareness, unwinding it to reveal the underlying dependent origination of emotions. This view aligns with research on mindfulness and emotional reactivity, which shows that acceptance is a key ingredient of therapies that relieve stress." Condon and Makransky describe an example meditation script:
The practitioner begins with the receptive mode by reinhabiting their field of care. While continuing to resonate with a felt sense of care as a secure base, they then bring to mind a person or group who is suffering and generates affective and cognitive empathy for the others’ suffering. The practitioner lets the power of this empathy become an intense energy and attitude of compassion, wishing others free of the causes of their distress and suffering. The practitioner lets this wish and energy of compassion radiate powerfully from their heart to that person or group. After some time, the compassionate wish and energy is extended more expansively to all beings who experience the various sufferings of living and dying, infusing them and their environment in the same radiant power of compassion, wishing them well and free. If the practice becomes too effortful or rigid at any stage, the practitioner can return to the receptive mode (analogous to returning to a secure base as needed for support). The meditation concludes with the releasing phase, in which the compassion evoked by the meditation helps the practitioner relax deeply into the openness, clarity and warmth of their fundamental awareness, an unlimited secure base, the primordial source of love and compassion, where all patterns of thought and feeling are permitted to unwind and release.
Racism and constructed emotion
In her book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo talks about many different forms of constructionism: the construct of race, gender, and emotion. But she first begins with a simple idea that should be self-evident: in any context where the prevailing social constructs create a situation that unjustly advantages one group over another, the advantaged group is ethically compelled to acknowledge and address the situation. In this case, that means deconstructing racism. The reality however, is that the advantaged group very often uses a variety of defense mechanisms to avoid acknowledging, taking responsibility, or acting to address the problem. DiAngelo explains how this dynamic has played out: "Inevitable racist assumptions held and patterns displayed by white people conditioned by living in a white supremacist culture... when questioned, trigger various emotions, which activate some expected behaviors. These behaviors are then justified by numerous claims." (117) Among these numerous rationalizations the myths of meritocracy, individualism, and objectivity are commonly invoked, but they only serve to reinforce racism. DiAngelo recognizes that this dynamic is active within her own lived experience: "deep anti-black feelings have been inculcated in me since childhood. These feelings surface immediately - in fact, before I can even think... These are the deeper feelings I need to be willing to examine, for these feelings can and do seep out without my awareness and hurt those whom I love." (90) One of the lessons is that we can take responsibility for and change these constructs: "Many of us see emotions as naturally occurring. But emotions are political in two key ways. First, our emotions are shaped by our biases and beliefs, our cultural frameworks... they are the result of frameworks we are using to make sense of social relations. And of course, social relations are political." (132)
In his book “How to be an Antiracist“ Ibram Kendi shows the reader how racism operates in a variety of areas of life and discusses many of the same conceptual constructions that Robin DiAngelo brought up in White Fragility, while expanding the list to include, for example, language and dialects (83), and class-racism constructs like "ghetto Blacks" and "White trash" (153). He defines race as "a power construct of collected or merged differences that lives socially“. (35, 238) Note that for Kendi racism is a "power construct", not a social construct. (201) And it is overwhelmingly driven by economic, political, or cultural self interest, not "hateful immorality or ignorance". (206) The focus is on power: “As long as the mind oppresses the oppressed by thinking their oppressive environment has retarded their behavior, the mind can never be anti-racist.“ (104) "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions." (142) “The problem with race has always been at its core of the problem of power, not the problem of immorality or ignorance." (208) According to Kendi, self interest leads to racist policies, and racist policies lead to racist ideas. (230) What this uncovers is a positive feedback cycle. Conceptual beliefs (i.e. individual self interest) leads to public policies, evidence is selectively gathered to support the policies, and rationalizations are then made to reinforce the policies and supporting beliefs. The cycle continues. It's similar to the dynamic described by DiAngelo.
The question is: How do we intervene and interrupt this cycle? Kendi's solution (231-232) effectively addresses this by viewing the process of policy selection through the critical antiracist model, an approach public health professionals should adopt. When antiracist policies are implemented, racist fears do not come to pass. "Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared." (208) Kendi recognizes that "demonstrations can provide emotional support for ongoing protests". (216) Open minds, once transformed, need support and guidance in order to use the opportunities available to change racist policies. But critically, we cannot allow inflexible ideological purity prevent action. Activism that is solely sustained by a vision of purity or a pursuit of positive feelings will inevitably succumb to cynicism and resignation:
"We arrive at demonstrations excited, as if our favorite musician is playing on the speakers' stage. We convince ourselves we are doing something to solve the racial problem when we are really doing something to satisfy our feelings. We go home fulfilled, like we dined at our favorite restaurant. And this fulfillment is fleeting, like a drug high. The problems of inequity and injustice persist. They persistently make us feel bad and guilty. We persistently do something to make ourselves feel better as we convince ourselves we are making society better, as we never make society better. What if instead of a feelings advocacy we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish? What if we focused our human and fiscal resources on changing power and policy to actually make society, not just our feelings, better?" (210)
In the Winter 1999 issue of Tricycle magazine, the article "A Sangha by Another Name", written by Charles Johnson, was published. Johnson wrote eloquently on race as seen through the lens of the Black experience in an interreligious society. The moral lesson he distills is among the clearest statements of social justice I have yet encountered:
"Martin Luther King Jr. was, at bottom, a Baptist minister, yes, but one whose vision of the social gospel at its best complements the expansive, Mahayana bodhisattva ideal of laboring for the liberation of all sentient beings (“Strangely enough,” he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be”). His dream of the “beloved community” is a sangha by another name, for King believed that, “It really boils down to this: that all of life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” The emphasis in Buddhist teachings on letting go of the fabricated, false sense of self positions issues of Race as foremost among samsaric illusions, along with all the essentialist conceptions of difference that have caused so much human suffering and mischief since the eighteenth century. It frees one from dualistic models of epistemology that partition experience into separate, boxlike compartments of Mind and Body, Self and Other, Matter and Spirit — these divisions, one sees, are ontologically the correlates of racial divisions found in South African apartheid and American segregation and are just as pernicious.
"More than anything else, the Dharma teaches mindfulness. You watch the prismatic play of desires and emotions (for example: joy, fear, pride, and so-called “black rage”) as they arise in awareness, but without attachment or clinging to name and form, and then you let them go. After Siddartha Gautama had abandoned experiencing the world through concepts and representations, after he realizes the cessation of mental constructions, he perceives the interdependence of all things, how — as Thich Nhat Hanh says — “Everything is made of everything else, nothing can be by itself alone” (anatman) in a universe of ceaseless change and transformation. Then and only then is it possible to realize Dr. King’s injunction that we “Love our enemies” in the struggle for justice because once one approaches the “enemy” with love and compassion the “enemy,” the Other, is seen to be oneself. All things, we learn, are ourselves. Thus, practice necessarily leads to empathy, the “Feeling Heart” W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of, Jean Toomer’s sense that all is sacred, and the experience of connectedness to all sentient beings. In this nondiscursive, expansive spirit discrimination is inconceivable. After the practitioner has charged his battery, so to speak, in meditation, he eagerly works and creates to serve others — all others — with humility, a boundless joy in giving, fearlessness, and disinterest in all personal “rewards.”
Affect and Aesthetic, Acceptance and Compassion
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| David Mitchell |
Is there a link between emotions and aesthetics, art, design, and architecture? According to Whitehead, the affective feeling of aesthetic beauty is more fundamental than the cognitive understanding of truth, in fact, we create theories in order to feel more enjoyment, purpose, and satisfaction. This is why he believes that “the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of beauty” and an aesthetic drive for "depth of satisfaction" in the "harmony" of "patterned contrasts". Experiences are enriched when incompatibilities are transformed into contrasts that can be integrated within a greater “complexity of order”. In Modes of Thought he wrote "History is the record of the expressions of feelings particular to humanity" (p27). But in what particular contexts are such numinous feelings of awe (or dread) created? Whitehead's teleology could be understood to be one implication of emotional inference. We know that life proceeds from the bottom up. All life must learn how to anticipate and synchronize biological processes to achieve allostasis. The physiology of organic life is essentially the representational/generative model evolved for this purpose. These models produce affective/aesthetic experiences when sampling the environment for valuable "model evidence". (Through conceptual construction, we call these the feelings of love, beauty, etc.). The logic of teleology, because it is goal oriented, reverses this order and proceeds from the top down. It begins with a singular truth: our awareness of beauty and love, which we experience under specific conditions. This affirms the existence of creatures, like us, who are capable of realizing these states. How is this awareness realized? By caring for others and creating the conditions for greater enjoyment and satisfaction in living. How is that done? By sharing appropriate models for learning how to synchronize our needs with each other and the environment around us. ...This neatly integrates experience and embodiment.
According to the theory of constructed emotion, people form a variety of associations according to their socio-cultural milieu, and furthermore they express these affective dispositions differently. While it's certainly true that one's home, or any living space, is a model, and may even embody a particular emotional feel, it must be contextualized with the living processes that occur within it before it is possible to understand what emotions it is frequently associated with. These are important considerations, as the children growing up within a particular home need a strong emotional model that connects them to the wisdom of their ancestors and the ephemeral beauty of their art, music, and language. Whitehead's intuitions are echoed in "The Sense of Wonder", where Rachel Carson wrote: "I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."
The allure of Enya's “Even in the Shadows” lies in how it’s a comfort even as it gives voice to “loss and failure and searching and desire and the ultimate impermanence” of it all, according to the ambient artist and songwriter Emily Sprague. And the soothing churn of her song “Only Time” speaks to the act of reimagining doubt as energy, or seeing pain as temporary. Psychological studies have shown that acceptance of dark emotions is connected to better emotional resilience, fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, and maintaining peace of mind. Brett Ford, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, says “acceptance involves not trying to change how we are feeling, but staying in touch with your feelings and taking them for what they are; it appears that acceptance uniquely affects negative emotions, and isn’t interfering with positive emotions.” Ford says "acceptance, non-judging acceptance, seems to be the key ingredient to mindfulness." Habitually accepting negative emotions not only reduces feelings of ill-being, but is also more likely to lead to elevated levels of well-being.
Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, says one critical way of dealing with a difficult emotion is to label it effectively (emotional granularity). This helps us understand the cause of those emotions and activates what’s called a ‘readiness potential,’ your ability to set goals and make real concrete changes. What’s more important is not whether you have negative thoughts or emotions but whether you get hooked into them,” she says, “which is when those thoughts start to drive your behaviors and your interactions.” Once you identify your emotion, “notice the emotion with compassion. This allows you to create a safe space within yourself in which you are then able to take more risks. You’re able to explore the world, and you’re able to be more effective, because you know that if things don’t go right that you will still like yourself, you’ll still be kind to yourself. Compassion is associated with greater levels of effectiveness."
Emotions and Stigmergy
The idea of economic planning, discussed in the previous post, suggests centralized control, however there are ways to distribute control without centralization and still obtain the benefits of planning for goal achievement. Stigmergy (or sematectonic communication) provides a useful example of how to achieve global coordination through local action. Originally the concept was used to solve the "coordination paradox" between the individual and the societal level. The explanation is that individuals interact indirectly: each affects the behavior of others by indirect coordination. By following a simple decentralized rule set, the small actions of each person attract other people, who then build upon and modify their behavior choices, eventually constructing and modifying their niche to achieve "generalized synchrony". Social media and especially "civic technology" (like the Polis platform) is arguably stigmergic.
In the context of the theory of constructed emotion, we could see how a sort of "emotional stigmergy", with its distinct ethical/aesthetic dimensions, might operate. For example, an individual who cultivates/constructs bodicitta would, via that normative framework, assign more salience to certain features within their environment. In other words such a person would supposedly tend to engage in work that supports compassionate care for others, such as provision of universal basic services. In this example, the small acts of numerous individuals (i.e. bodhisattvas) who share the same emotional/normative framework would constitute a self-organizing social network capable of functioning without the need for centralized planning. This has several advantages. As Alex Pentland noted, “The most efficient and robust architectures tend to be ones that have no central points. It means that there's no single place for a dictator to grab control."
The Free Energy Principle and Emotions
The paper “An Investigation of the Free Energy Principle for Emotion Recognition” states “Conditions seen in psychiatry are almost exclusively about the self in relation to others”. This is widely recognized, another paper also notes: “Emotional awareness (i.e., the ability to recognize and understand one's own emotions) plays a key role in many psychiatric disorders. Understanding such mechanisms could represent an important step in being able to identify which mechanisms are operative in different individuals and how they might be targeted on an individual basis within therapy.” Returning to the first paper: “In general, psychiatry is concerned with the failure of interpersonal inference, and this necessarily has an emotional aspect to it. Under the active inference framework [which was formulated to explain how adaptive agents learn, and to encompass all of self-organizing entities into a unifying scientific theory], these psychiatric symptoms occur due to the failure of emotional inference. Under the emotional inference perspective, emotions are hypotheses about the causes of data. In active inference accounts of communication, two agents model each other in an infinite regress (modeling you modeling me modeling you and so on), and through this coupling they adopt generalized synchrony. In the context of emotion recognition, this demonstrates the possibility of synchronizing emotions in two person (dyadic) interactions or group situations, such that they are attending to and attenuating sensory information in order to properly cause and predict each other's emotional states. Once they have established a generalized synchrony, it would be possible to implement prior preferences in an agent's generative model to steer the emotional synchrony to a specific desired emotional state (happy, calm, etc.).” Or in the wrong hands, as others noted, generalized synchrony could be used to steer an agent into dogmatism and radicalism, suppressing individual expression, creativity, and well-being. According to some observers, this appears to be the societal effect of several notable social media platforms (see section above regarding misinformation).
The dynamic parts of Sustainable Compassion Training - receptiveness (appreciation/gratitude/receiving care), and inclusiveness (extending/reciprocating care) - are directly implied by emotional inference and the need to establish a global form of generalized synchrony. This is a cross cultural ethical norm, and now more than ever it must encompass all life. The synchrony between ourselves and the world is crucial. Two verses in the Christian Bible come to mind in connection with this: “Man does not live on bread alone”. (Deuteronomy 8:3) and “Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.” (John 15:9) We need to receive and extend compassion and care; physical nourishment is not enough. We are all a part of the field of care, the practice of giving and taking, sending and receiving. The paper "Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition" also refers to the importance of resonance/synchrony/congruence: "Much of our thoughts and behaviors function in the service of reducing any discrepancies. When there is a discrepancy, negative affect occurs (e.g., fear, frustration). If the discrepancy is reduced, then the mind can exit this mode and a feeling of well-being will follow." This is where comparative modeling, the comparison of different modes of inferential or entailment structures that Robert Rosen discussed at length (he called it the "modeling relation"), can shed light. Rosen argued that modeling "is the art of bringing entailment structures into congruence", which is to say that it is all about reducing discrepancy, which reduces dysphoric affect (anxiety, rumination, and depression). Today we do not understand well enough how to reduce discrepancies and achieve generalized synchrony. As Rosen noted, this has tragic consequences: "human beings are so often willing to die; i.e. to suffer biological extinction, rather than change their models" (Anticipatory Systems, 370). Will we learn in time?
Altruism and Generalized Synchrony
In “Ways of Knowing Compassion”, Mascaro et al. write: “Social psychologists generally view compassion as a prosocial state that is responsive to others’ suffering and that motivates costly helping behaviors intended to alleviate suffering, potentially at the expense of oneself. An action or state is prosocial to the extent that it is conducive to social bonding and acceptance. While prosocial helping is distinct from compassion, it is understood as an outcome of some compassionate motivational state. As such, costly helping behavior is often used to infer that compassion is present. For this reason, observations of helping behaviors have been instrumental in garnering ecological validity for compassion as a psychological construct that can influence human (and perhaps animal) behavior.” This reminds me of Amotz Zahavi’s research on altruism. Zahavi wrote "Mate selection - a selection for a handicap" (1975). He studied Arabian Babblers and developed the Handicap Principle and Signal Selection (a generalization of sexual selection), which was elaborated on in his book “The Handicap Principle: a missing piece of Darwin's puzzle”. Specifically in chapter 12 "Babblers, competition for prestige, and the evolution of altruism", he described that when an animal acts altruistically, it handicaps itself - assumes a risk or endures a sacrifice - not primarily to benefit its kin or social group but to increase its own prestige within the group and thus signal its status (and fitness) as a partner or rival. "Altruistic acts obviously demonstrate - and are perceived as demonstrating - the abilities of those who perform them" (p225). Maybe his interpretation wasn’t complete, but the mechanisms he uncovered were very real. What if we reinterpret these with the aid of newer research from model selectionism? Now a more fundamental understanding might be achieved: altruism increases prestige because it increases resonance/synchrony and minimizes free energy. While prestige may be the intermediary proximal result, we can see that generalized synchrony is the distal goal.
Additional Reading:
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How emotions are made (2017, highly acclaimed, integrates predictive processing and active inference accounts of interoception with the theory of constructed emotion, a short video based on it.)
David DeSteno, Emotional success (2018, recommended by Barrett, and written by her colleage)
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on happiness (2005, recommended by Barrett)
Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions (2003, a dialogue, participants include: Tenzin Gyatso, Matthieu Ricard, Alan Wallace)
Robert Solomon, Not Passion's Slave (2003)
Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder (2016)
Steven Strogatz, Sync (2003)
Ken Jones, The New Social Face of Buddhism (2003, page 105):
"A meditation practice directly related to social activism is the ancient brahma-vihara (sublime abidings) meditation. The meditator generates a spirit of loving kindness (metta) within which is directed successively to oneself, to a friend, to a stranger, and to an enemy. When he or she has become adept at this metta-bhavana, the meditation is extended successively to include the virtues of compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha)."2
Footnotes:
[1] A note on Buddhism. Bodhicitta, bodhisattva, and brahmavihārā are all distinctly Buddhist ideas. But why refer to or use Buddhist concepts and terminology? The philosophical treatment of emotion here is well developed and applicable without too much difficulty. All the same, other religions and esoteric interpretations may be used if preferred, as the apparent differences among various traditions may be more superficial than we suppose. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1885–1975) wrote “Buddha and Jesus are men of the same brotherhood”. He believed Jesus was heavily influenced by Eastern, especially Buddhist, ideas. Ian Johnson pointed out that this is not an unreasonable claim, "Buddha’s writings predate Christianity and may have circulated in the Middle East around the time of Jesus". The perennial philosophy has been expressed in many beliefs and frameworks. (The influence goes both ways of course, as later Tolstoy would come to have a profound influence on Gandhi.) ...In contrast with the positive emotions of the brahmavihārās that promote well-being, Buddhism also identifies "afflictive emotions" that obscure the mind. These commonly include delusion, greed, and hate. Critics of Buddhism have noted that it is better to try to understand and satisfy (or transform) natural emotions, such as desire and attachment, rather than to pathologize them as unequivocally harmful. In response, Buddhists have noted this criticism reflects an incomplete understanding of Buddhist thought on emotional health, which considers the context in which emotions are experienced as well.
[2] "We speak of four things to cultivate: love, equanimity, compassion, and rejoicing. Though you may not see a symbiotic relation at first, you do as you continue to practice. If you practice loving-kindness, for instance, your attachment may grow, so at that time you switch to equanimity. If you keep on practitcing equanimity, at some point you may risk falling into indifference, so at that time you raise compassion for those who suffer. Now, as a beginner, if you excessively bring to mind the sufferings of beings, you might fall into depression. So then you shift again to rejoicing in some positive aspect of the happiness of others. That shows us how those come together in some way, within the scope of practice." [Source: "Destructive Emotions" (2003), page 163]
Appendix: Ten (paraphrased) quotes
- A. N. Whitehead: "The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty."
- Rachel Carson: "I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide them, it is not half so important to know as to feel."
- Condon and Makransky: "Relationality is the starting point for humans, and it remains a fundamental need throughout life. People are an extension of a field of care in which they are held, and from which they hold and support others."
- Ursula Le Guin: "Successful human relationships involve entrainment — getting in sync."
- Daphne Demekas: "People model each other in an infinite regress (modeling you modeling me modeling you and so on), and through this coupling they adopt generalized synchrony, causing and predicting each other's emotional states."
- Tania Singer: "People are wired for affective resonance, for naturally reflecting each other’s emotions and motivational states. Global leaders should work to develop sustainable, equitable, and caring political systems, economies, and societies that encourage individuals to meet their full socio-emotional and cognitive potentials – and thus, to create a world in which we all want to live."
- Robin DiAngelo: "Our emotions are shaped by our biases and beliefs, the cultural frameworks we use to make sense of social relations."
- Rainer Maria Rilke: "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."
- Martha Nussbaum: "There are two tasks for the political cultivation of emotion. One is to engender and sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that require effort and sacrifice. The other is to keep at bay forces that lurk in all societies and, ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others."
- Thich Nhat Hanh: "If you don’t understand the roots of your loved one’s suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if they don’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of their suffering in order to help bring relief. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love."
