I'm glad to see this post Matt, and thank you for putting it up. Specific comments follow -- a mixture of reactions, reflections and quibbles. I realise that this work is already published. Any value in such commentary then may be in contribution to your further reflection and discussion, and I hope that some of it may be useful in that role.
> In reality, emotions are far more complex and integral to decision making than the simplistic dual-process perspective suggests.
I strongly agree. But the reasons our narratives of psychology have favoured reasons over reactions have a lot to do with the size and complexity of the societies producing the psychology, and their own economic histories. As you likely already know, these rational-dominant narratives don't operate in all cultures, and so far as I've seen, are nigh impossible to find in pre-agricultural societies. There are whole sections of our own society who don't experience their minds in this way and are baffled when it's unpacked in this form. We're still dealing with the legacy of our history here.
> emotions don’t arise randomly—they are reactions to events that matter to us.
Not always true. Our emotional response is a synthesis of *everything* that's happening, including conditions not tied to a single event. Consider for example, the impact on mood of the state of our gut flora, the impact of immunocompromise on sense of wellbeing, or what happens to endurance athletes over the course of a long period of training. Then there's what happens in a range of psychopathologies where it's hard to tell whether a delusion creates the emotional reaction, or the emotion engenders the delusion. We could equally wonder what's happening in infant and early childhood development too, when emotional reactions are strong, but cognition is still developing.
Emotions can be reactive but the ontological tendency to pigeonhole them this way is a product of a rational-dominant society of contracts and agreements. (I know you're making a similar point, but my point is that it's not just legacy philosophy of mind, but legacy language of mind causing problems here.)
> Emotions are explicitly tied to desired and feared outcomes, reflecting a strong connection to our values and goals.
Not always true. Infants can display a fear of falling while having no idea what's happening. We are wired for emotional responses to some perceptions, regardless of our understanding of incident or apprehension of outcome.
> Emotions can arise both in anticipation of and in reaction to experiences.
And conditions, whether or not we entirely apprehend them -- please see my earlier points.
> Emotions often produce a corresponding action tendency, serving as a source of motivation.
Agreed, but behaviouralism struggles with mechanism here. It's one of the few times when I think it's the wrong framework to use.
> The stronger the emotion, the greater its influence on our decisions.
Rather, on 'responses' -- there may or may not be decisions attached.
> Our emotions are inextricably linked to those goals and values
Even more than that, we have whole human endeavours -- some expensive and risky -- designed principally to produce emotional effect. That's not just art, but crafts, sports, recreations and a range of human interaction styles. We're a social species that cooperates for protection, food-gathering and child-rearing while competing for sex and food, and our emotional responses are all geared around these evolutionary forces. Primatology tells us that we had prelingual signals with emotional effect long before we had complex language to link emotion with consequence. Anthropology shows that we retain and still use these facilities. Not all of this is goal-driven because we may have no conception of what we actually want, and yet feel compelled to act anyway.
> emotions are essential for discerning the value of different decision options
No they aren't, because we have automated decision-systems that can discern value. While popular among philosophers, this argument conflates the innate capacity of emotions to synthesise with the need for all synthesis to be emotional.
It's also a bit of is-ought fallacy: 'emotions are always involved, therefore they're always needed'. A more constructive point is that they're always involved, and therefore unwise to ignore.
> Emotions may help us assign value, but powerful emotions can also override other important pieces of information, narrowing our focus and leading to biased or impulsive decisions.
Yes, but further: emotions are typically short-term, self-focused, tribal syntheses while many of our modern social decisions require us to think in transpersonal terms. The prevalence of careerism, cronyism, factionalism, transactionalism and short-termism in policy selection and design tells us that we struggle with this. (In fact when I try to discuss transpersonal motives with most people, I get blank looks from some, while others think I'm talking metaphysics.)
> While emotions can sometimes complicate our choices, they are ultimately what give decisions their meaning and direction.
No -- they're only *part* of what nourishes our sense of meaning and direction. While it's hard to spontaneously pursue directions contrary to emotional reaction, it's also trainable, and whole cadres of people do it all the time. However 'meaning' and 'direction' might be recognised, they're not purely emotional in all people.
> Ultimately, emotions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad—they are tools.
I disagree. They're only tools in persuasion, entertainment and propaganda. Both experientially and behaviourally they're information, conditions and pressures -- part resource, part constraint. Our tools are therefore methods and techniques for understanding, exploiting, transforming and managing them.
This stuff is tricky yet critical. I love that you're presenting it and look forward to reading more.
Thanks for the comments, Ruv. I agree that the role emotion is given varies tremendously across culture and history. A lot of the modern view seems to be tied directly to the Enlightenment and the beginning of more and more emphasis on rationality - with emotion often portrayed as being irrational.
Now in terms of your commentary emotions being event-specific, I agree to some degree, but for the broader comments you are making, I would typically use the more abstract concept of affect. So, a lot of what you mention here is indeed affective responses that are not directly tied to specific events; emotions are a specific type of affect that are tied to specific events. Admittedly, some of those other forms of affect (especially moods) can bias us toward specific emotions (e.g., a grumpy person is more easily angered), and so that gets at your point about emotions being a synthesis of everything (they are a culmination of the interactions between the person - including all those things you mentioned - and the environment). This is why we don't always respond to the same environmental events in the exact same way - and they don't always have the same effect on our decision making. Emotions always exist in the person-environment context.
When it comes to infants and emotions, there's a lot we don't know. It seems plausible that, just like other animals, we have some basic instinct-based emotions hard-wired into us. We don't need to consciously process or interpret something that causes pain to feel pain. There's an obvious connection between human physiology and emotions, and so some (maybe most) of the experience of emotions themselves are a function of physiological changes, which would still be present in infants. The cognitive development aspect becomes a basis as much for interpretation of those emotions and the allowance of that interpretation to influence how we respond to them (i.e. as we develop more cognitive agency, if you will, our response options increase).
>>It's also a bit of is-ought fallacy: 'emotions are always involved, therefore they're always needed'. A more constructive point is that they're always involved, and therefore unwise to ignore.<<
I would agree with this to some extent, though I would argue that the same physiological mechanisms that allow for emotions to exist also give rise to our ability to discern among options, especially when it comes to actually choosing. Perhaps there's some choices that exist outside of that potential, but the work on brain trauma and damage to various parts of the brain that involve emotion subsequently lead to hindrance in our ability to actively make choices.
>>No -- they're only *part* of what nourishes our sense of meaning and direction.<<
I can accept this, and you'll see that I have slightly updated the post to temper a bit of the language in it as a result. So thank you for that.
You'll even see that I changed the first sentence of the final paragraph to accommodate this idea: "Ultimately, emotions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad—they merely serve as a source of information and influence."
Matt, thank you for your reply and for the thought that you're giving this topic.
> A lot of the modern view seems to be tied directly to the Enlightenment and the beginning of more and more emphasis on rationality - with emotion often portrayed as being irrational.
It is tied, but I think the role of Enlightenment thought is complicated and at times, quite pernicious. Here's why.
The Enlightenment thinkers were largely Deists. They wanted a creative divinity -- a benign and coherent architect of cause and consequence -- who displayed all the top-down authority of empire, with none of the tyranny. That second criterion came via Gutenberg, Martin Luther and the economics of colonial adventurism -- by which I mean that this thought is motivated by political economics and is far from free of self-interest. It's a prosperity narrative as much as a moral philosophy, so let's briefly unpack it.
Enlightenment philosophers had enough math and engineering to conceive a designed world that could be set and run indefinitely without magical intercession, where the moral issues could be readily discerned and resolved by observation and discussion alone, according to self-consistent instincts universally imbued in human thought.
This created a pro-colonial progressivism where individual purpose and collective need were never innately at odds, but where the exploitation of resources on land occupied by others, using labour coerced from elsewhere nevertheless continued to be justified as benign civilisation rather than the imperial tyranny that they had just rejected.
That civilisation assumption got propped up by contrasting written vs oral traditions; rational vs emotional appreciations; proactive vs reactive responses. It gave us our modern ontology of racism and a lot of the language underpinning sexism not *despite* its rationalism, but because of why that rationalism was required.
It also made assumptions about our world that were thoroughly debunked by the early 20th century (what Darwin didn't kill, Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel minced), and produced a conception of mind entirely informed by the need to justify a preconceived hierarchy of political power.
We tend to celebrate Enlightenment reason without acknowledging just how conflicted were their motives and how tattered their assumptions, but their progressivism is nevertheless retained in a lot of our philosophy of mind. (It's still there in the ethos of therapy, for instance.)
This tradition explains why it remains attractive to call emotions 'tools', for example. That would make sense in a Deist universe. It's not sensible in a universe of evolutionary biology.
Yet if you water 'tool' down to 'affect' then you're not yet free of Deist progressivism. You're still inhabiting a peaceful world that runs to orderly purpose, interrupted only by unforeseen incident. In practice though, our emotional reactions are not always affects because they don't always arise from incidental causes. Emotions are systemic and systems can have feedback. Feedback loops can do odd things, even when systems are left alone. In many jurisdictions, our worst institutional punishment is solitary confinement *because* of what happens to a bored mind emotionally, even when there's no new information to cause emotional affect.
> I would argue that the same physiological mechanisms that allow for emotions to exist also give rise to our ability to discern among options, especially when it comes to actually choosing.
I didn't understand this, Matt. What physiological mechanisms did you mean? Are you talking the whole of neurology or something specific? If you're saying that neurons can produce many different decision-making architectures then that's true, but I'm not sure where it gets us.
> Ultimately, emotions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad—they merely serve as a source of information and influence
I don't disagree with you about the Enlightenment.
In terms of clarifying my point from earlier, what I was arguing is that emotion doesn't exist independently of human physiology. The same physiological mechanisms that enable emotions—including the brain structures and processes identified by Damasio in his somatic marker hypothesis—also underlie our ability to evaluate and differentiate between options. Given this, the notion that emotion can be fully excluded from conscious decision making (and likely even from less effortful choices) is not supported by the preponderance of evidence.
> what I was arguing is that emotion doesn't exist independently of human physiology
We have agreed on this throughout -- see for example, my comments on gut flora and mood. I think we have nothing to argue about here.
> the notion that emotion can be fully excluded from conscious decision making (and likely even from less effortful choices) is not supported by the preponderance of evidence
We have agreed on this throughout also, Matt. In fact, it's highlighted in our earlier chat about consensus-building and policy design. The role of emotion (including collective emotion) in human decision-making not only can't be ignored, it's probably vastly understated. Far easier to get consensus at scale emotionally than rationally, which explains a lot of how human politics operate and might also help explain how religions continue to prosper even when their doctrines are soundly debunked.
I'm glad to see this post Matt, and thank you for putting it up. Specific comments follow -- a mixture of reactions, reflections and quibbles. I realise that this work is already published. Any value in such commentary then may be in contribution to your further reflection and discussion, and I hope that some of it may be useful in that role.
> In reality, emotions are far more complex and integral to decision making than the simplistic dual-process perspective suggests.
I strongly agree. But the reasons our narratives of psychology have favoured reasons over reactions have a lot to do with the size and complexity of the societies producing the psychology, and their own economic histories. As you likely already know, these rational-dominant narratives don't operate in all cultures, and so far as I've seen, are nigh impossible to find in pre-agricultural societies. There are whole sections of our own society who don't experience their minds in this way and are baffled when it's unpacked in this form. We're still dealing with the legacy of our history here.
> emotions don’t arise randomly—they are reactions to events that matter to us.
Not always true. Our emotional response is a synthesis of *everything* that's happening, including conditions not tied to a single event. Consider for example, the impact on mood of the state of our gut flora, the impact of immunocompromise on sense of wellbeing, or what happens to endurance athletes over the course of a long period of training. Then there's what happens in a range of psychopathologies where it's hard to tell whether a delusion creates the emotional reaction, or the emotion engenders the delusion. We could equally wonder what's happening in infant and early childhood development too, when emotional reactions are strong, but cognition is still developing.
Emotions can be reactive but the ontological tendency to pigeonhole them this way is a product of a rational-dominant society of contracts and agreements. (I know you're making a similar point, but my point is that it's not just legacy philosophy of mind, but legacy language of mind causing problems here.)
> Emotions are explicitly tied to desired and feared outcomes, reflecting a strong connection to our values and goals.
Not always true. Infants can display a fear of falling while having no idea what's happening. We are wired for emotional responses to some perceptions, regardless of our understanding of incident or apprehension of outcome.
> Emotions can arise both in anticipation of and in reaction to experiences.
And conditions, whether or not we entirely apprehend them -- please see my earlier points.
> Emotions often produce a corresponding action tendency, serving as a source of motivation.
Agreed, but behaviouralism struggles with mechanism here. It's one of the few times when I think it's the wrong framework to use.
> The stronger the emotion, the greater its influence on our decisions.
Rather, on 'responses' -- there may or may not be decisions attached.
> Our emotions are inextricably linked to those goals and values
Even more than that, we have whole human endeavours -- some expensive and risky -- designed principally to produce emotional effect. That's not just art, but crafts, sports, recreations and a range of human interaction styles. We're a social species that cooperates for protection, food-gathering and child-rearing while competing for sex and food, and our emotional responses are all geared around these evolutionary forces. Primatology tells us that we had prelingual signals with emotional effect long before we had complex language to link emotion with consequence. Anthropology shows that we retain and still use these facilities. Not all of this is goal-driven because we may have no conception of what we actually want, and yet feel compelled to act anyway.
> emotions are essential for discerning the value of different decision options
No they aren't, because we have automated decision-systems that can discern value. While popular among philosophers, this argument conflates the innate capacity of emotions to synthesise with the need for all synthesis to be emotional.
It's also a bit of is-ought fallacy: 'emotions are always involved, therefore they're always needed'. A more constructive point is that they're always involved, and therefore unwise to ignore.
> Emotions may help us assign value, but powerful emotions can also override other important pieces of information, narrowing our focus and leading to biased or impulsive decisions.
Yes, but further: emotions are typically short-term, self-focused, tribal syntheses while many of our modern social decisions require us to think in transpersonal terms. The prevalence of careerism, cronyism, factionalism, transactionalism and short-termism in policy selection and design tells us that we struggle with this. (In fact when I try to discuss transpersonal motives with most people, I get blank looks from some, while others think I'm talking metaphysics.)
> While emotions can sometimes complicate our choices, they are ultimately what give decisions their meaning and direction.
No -- they're only *part* of what nourishes our sense of meaning and direction. While it's hard to spontaneously pursue directions contrary to emotional reaction, it's also trainable, and whole cadres of people do it all the time. However 'meaning' and 'direction' might be recognised, they're not purely emotional in all people.
> Ultimately, emotions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad—they are tools.
I disagree. They're only tools in persuasion, entertainment and propaganda. Both experientially and behaviourally they're information, conditions and pressures -- part resource, part constraint. Our tools are therefore methods and techniques for understanding, exploiting, transforming and managing them.
This stuff is tricky yet critical. I love that you're presenting it and look forward to reading more.
Thanks for the comments, Ruv. I agree that the role emotion is given varies tremendously across culture and history. A lot of the modern view seems to be tied directly to the Enlightenment and the beginning of more and more emphasis on rationality - with emotion often portrayed as being irrational.
Now in terms of your commentary emotions being event-specific, I agree to some degree, but for the broader comments you are making, I would typically use the more abstract concept of affect. So, a lot of what you mention here is indeed affective responses that are not directly tied to specific events; emotions are a specific type of affect that are tied to specific events. Admittedly, some of those other forms of affect (especially moods) can bias us toward specific emotions (e.g., a grumpy person is more easily angered), and so that gets at your point about emotions being a synthesis of everything (they are a culmination of the interactions between the person - including all those things you mentioned - and the environment). This is why we don't always respond to the same environmental events in the exact same way - and they don't always have the same effect on our decision making. Emotions always exist in the person-environment context.
When it comes to infants and emotions, there's a lot we don't know. It seems plausible that, just like other animals, we have some basic instinct-based emotions hard-wired into us. We don't need to consciously process or interpret something that causes pain to feel pain. There's an obvious connection between human physiology and emotions, and so some (maybe most) of the experience of emotions themselves are a function of physiological changes, which would still be present in infants. The cognitive development aspect becomes a basis as much for interpretation of those emotions and the allowance of that interpretation to influence how we respond to them (i.e. as we develop more cognitive agency, if you will, our response options increase).
>>It's also a bit of is-ought fallacy: 'emotions are always involved, therefore they're always needed'. A more constructive point is that they're always involved, and therefore unwise to ignore.<<
I would agree with this to some extent, though I would argue that the same physiological mechanisms that allow for emotions to exist also give rise to our ability to discern among options, especially when it comes to actually choosing. Perhaps there's some choices that exist outside of that potential, but the work on brain trauma and damage to various parts of the brain that involve emotion subsequently lead to hindrance in our ability to actively make choices.
>>No -- they're only *part* of what nourishes our sense of meaning and direction.<<
I can accept this, and you'll see that I have slightly updated the post to temper a bit of the language in it as a result. So thank you for that.
You'll even see that I changed the first sentence of the final paragraph to accommodate this idea: "Ultimately, emotions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad—they merely serve as a source of information and influence."
Matt, thank you for your reply and for the thought that you're giving this topic.
> A lot of the modern view seems to be tied directly to the Enlightenment and the beginning of more and more emphasis on rationality - with emotion often portrayed as being irrational.
It is tied, but I think the role of Enlightenment thought is complicated and at times, quite pernicious. Here's why.
The Enlightenment thinkers were largely Deists. They wanted a creative divinity -- a benign and coherent architect of cause and consequence -- who displayed all the top-down authority of empire, with none of the tyranny. That second criterion came via Gutenberg, Martin Luther and the economics of colonial adventurism -- by which I mean that this thought is motivated by political economics and is far from free of self-interest. It's a prosperity narrative as much as a moral philosophy, so let's briefly unpack it.
Enlightenment philosophers had enough math and engineering to conceive a designed world that could be set and run indefinitely without magical intercession, where the moral issues could be readily discerned and resolved by observation and discussion alone, according to self-consistent instincts universally imbued in human thought.
This created a pro-colonial progressivism where individual purpose and collective need were never innately at odds, but where the exploitation of resources on land occupied by others, using labour coerced from elsewhere nevertheless continued to be justified as benign civilisation rather than the imperial tyranny that they had just rejected.
That civilisation assumption got propped up by contrasting written vs oral traditions; rational vs emotional appreciations; proactive vs reactive responses. It gave us our modern ontology of racism and a lot of the language underpinning sexism not *despite* its rationalism, but because of why that rationalism was required.
It also made assumptions about our world that were thoroughly debunked by the early 20th century (what Darwin didn't kill, Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel minced), and produced a conception of mind entirely informed by the need to justify a preconceived hierarchy of political power.
We tend to celebrate Enlightenment reason without acknowledging just how conflicted were their motives and how tattered their assumptions, but their progressivism is nevertheless retained in a lot of our philosophy of mind. (It's still there in the ethos of therapy, for instance.)
This tradition explains why it remains attractive to call emotions 'tools', for example. That would make sense in a Deist universe. It's not sensible in a universe of evolutionary biology.
Yet if you water 'tool' down to 'affect' then you're not yet free of Deist progressivism. You're still inhabiting a peaceful world that runs to orderly purpose, interrupted only by unforeseen incident. In practice though, our emotional reactions are not always affects because they don't always arise from incidental causes. Emotions are systemic and systems can have feedback. Feedback loops can do odd things, even when systems are left alone. In many jurisdictions, our worst institutional punishment is solitary confinement *because* of what happens to a bored mind emotionally, even when there's no new information to cause emotional affect.
> I would argue that the same physiological mechanisms that allow for emotions to exist also give rise to our ability to discern among options, especially when it comes to actually choosing.
I didn't understand this, Matt. What physiological mechanisms did you mean? Are you talking the whole of neurology or something specific? If you're saying that neurons can produce many different decision-making architectures then that's true, but I'm not sure where it gets us.
> Ultimately, emotions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad—they merely serve as a source of information and influence
Agreed. The 'so what' remains open.
I don't disagree with you about the Enlightenment.
In terms of clarifying my point from earlier, what I was arguing is that emotion doesn't exist independently of human physiology. The same physiological mechanisms that enable emotions—including the brain structures and processes identified by Damasio in his somatic marker hypothesis—also underlie our ability to evaluate and differentiate between options. Given this, the notion that emotion can be fully excluded from conscious decision making (and likely even from less effortful choices) is not supported by the preponderance of evidence.
> what I was arguing is that emotion doesn't exist independently of human physiology
We have agreed on this throughout -- see for example, my comments on gut flora and mood. I think we have nothing to argue about here.
> the notion that emotion can be fully excluded from conscious decision making (and likely even from less effortful choices) is not supported by the preponderance of evidence
We have agreed on this throughout also, Matt. In fact, it's highlighted in our earlier chat about consensus-building and policy design. The role of emotion (including collective emotion) in human decision-making not only can't be ignored, it's probably vastly understated. Far easier to get consensus at scale emotionally than rationally, which explains a lot of how human politics operate and might also help explain how religions continue to prosper even when their doctrines are soundly debunked.