Consciousness -Emotions

**http://www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/Lieberman(2019)CogEmo.pdf

Thus, the fundamental question for a science of emotional experience is: Why do emotions feel like anything? Why are not emotions just nonconscious computations that integrate situational information with representations of current goals to produce appropriate actions, all without the muss and fuss of consciousness? We have lots of systems and processes in the human brain and body that operate just fine without any conscious components. Why is emotional experience one of the exceptions to the rule that almost everything in the universe is not conscious?

Frijda’s claim that “It should be possible to present, for every emotion, a corresponding description of how the world looks to the subject” (1986, p. 196).

In the mid-1990s, Jeffrey Gray, one of the grandfathers of affective neuroscience, gave a talk at Harvard University. Most of the talk focused on his foundational work identifying the neural bases of anxiety. However, he concluded his talk by suggesting that psychologists had been neglecting consciousness for too long and that try as they might ignore it, it will always eventually jump out and say “Boo!” because it is the central feature of our psychological lives. I believe emotion research has a consciousness problem and this article is an attempt to offer up my own “Boo!” on these issues. Just as Cognition & Emotion is turning 30 (congratulations!), this is a milestone for me as well. Thirty years ago, I started college and became a psychology major at Rutgers University. I was very excited to start studying subjects like emotion and consciousness because these are real attention-getters in teenagedom. The range, intensity, and complexity of emotions became strikingly apparent in these years. My emotional experiences often felt like bolts of lightning – brief hallucinogenic episodes that seemed to come out of nowhere, fundamentally altering how much of the world looked and felt to me and leading me to act in ways that I could scarcely recognise as my own once the episode subsided. As unnerving as some of those experiences were, it is difficult to imagine anything that was as captivating as emotional experiences. It was with this mindset that I took my first psychology courses. I was more than a little disappointed to discover that anything related to consciousness was largely verboten, a taboo topic to be avoided. I could not fathom why psychologists would avoid the singular topic, consciousness that made their field unique from all others – but avoid they did. Skinner and the behaviourists replaced consciousness with behaviour. Cognitive psychologists replaced consciousness with cognitive operations. Neuroscientists then replaced the study of consciousness with the study of neural activity. And these days, everyone replaces everything with computations. To be clear, these are all worthy contributions to psychology, but I could not understand why they each took their place of prominence at the expense of conscious experience receding further into the background of the field.

Androids?

Delores is perhaps the most interesting case because Westworld shows how fully biologically realised these androids are. I suspect the androids might even have startle and galvanic skin responses. We might wonder whether these androids actually have emotions. But the answer comes down to one thing and only one thing – do they have emotional experience? They may have the most exquisitely contextually sensitive emotional expressions and actions and they can have all the physiology of emotion, but if they do not have the experience of emotion then it is just an incredibly sophisticated simulation – the appearance of emotion, but not actual emotion. All emotion is emotional experience and everything else is a correlate.

Conscious, Unconscious Process

Frijda (1986) provided a solution to these issues that parallels the reflective/pre-reflective distinction. As indicated above, Frijda identified emotion as a mode of seeing and vision is a paradigmatic prereflective process with countless simultaneous automatic processes giving rise to not-yet-reflected upon experience. If emotion is like seeing, then it follows that we ought to think of appraisal processes as analogous to perceptual processes. Processing of valence, arousal, controllability, and agency should be thought about and studied the same way that we study motion, colour, texture and shape processing. In both cases, these processes are literally the lenses through which we see the world. Dimensions like agency or motion can be reflected upon, but typically are not and do not need to be in order to contribute to