Let us definean appraisal, not as an evaluative judgment, but as any representation of an organism-environment relation the bears on well-being.
This seems to me to be similar to Fodor's idea of representational propositions. One can draw a judgment about one's well-being vis-a-vis the environment without the se of higher order logic.
the intentionality objection does not require oneto abandon the core idea behind the somatic theory
I agree that even though James stated his theory much too simplistically, there is much to be said for it. Our subconscious (unconscious?) reaction is much too strong to fully rule it out.
an anger elicitation file can spawn an“indignation” offshoot that contains representations of different kinds of injustice. Culturecan exert considerable influence on how elicitation files are modified and created.
Propositions about objects are highly influenced by tradition or community, i.e., by how people who are emotionally significant to you, past or present, have responded to the same object.
We can alsoindividuate emotions by their eliciting conditions.
Singling out one emotion as opposed to another requires a more conscious analysis, one we can only perform by knowing the object of the emotional proposition.
If the bodily statesof emotions are shared, it is because many emotions belong to common families
Because many emotions are close cousins of one another the body needs only a comparatively small repertoire with which to evidence them.
is less satisfying for exercise arousal, fatigue,starvation, and other more global bodily states.
Fatigue and hunger certainly seem like they could involve assenting to propositions about given objects. Even the afterglow from working out seems like an emotion to me. at a minimum it makes one more receptive to having a positive emotion later.
If a critic claimed to find delight in an artwork, but showed absolutely nowsight of somatic response, we might justifiably question her sincerity.
A well-played piece of music may bring you to your feet in a standing ovation. A provocative piece may keep you sitting quietly in your seat without applauding. An offensive one may provoke you to storm out, or even riot (or so we are told about Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring.").
James cites certain moral, aesthetic, and intellectual feelings. He refers tothese as cerebral emotions,
Akin to the Oriental concept of enlightenment. Are we sure that these "cerebral emotions" have no physical manifestations?
Is there abodily correlate of guilt? What about loneliness?
Hmm. Uplifting the shoulders to protect the neck? Slouching?
vagus nerve, and cranial nerves
Cranial nerves grow from the brain rather than out from the spine. The vagus nerve is the most important cranial nerve and controls fight-flight response. Apparently both are associated with a more primitive form of awareness than the spinal nerves. (Wikipedia)
The authors want us to mental subtract all the bodily symptoms from an imaged emotionalstate and see what remains.
What remains, it seems to me, is either quiet acceptance of our fate or else a respite that gives us an opportunity to weigh possibilities for escape.
there is evidence that bodily changes caninduce emotions
So it is a two way street. Even though the consensus now is that an emotion are a sort of judgment, an appropriate change in the body can elicit a corresponding emotion. Certainly there is something in-between. Perhaps, sometimes, when things are too painful, a judgment is felt first by the body before it can be admitted to as a proposition in the consciousness.
Emotions are somatic, but they are also fundamentally semantic
Emotions bridge the physical world and the mental world--if indeed these domains are distinct.
exciting factcauses a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of thesame changes as they occurISthe emotion.
When I see a bear, do I run away because I am afraid or is my fear just my recognition that I am running away?
No,thereal,complete,recognitionofthatterribleevent(asmanytimesasIrecognizeit)istheupheaval.
The judgment that is the culmination of the emotion could be suggested as the cause of the physical reaction. But it doesn't work. the judgment and the physical response are simultaneous. They are integral to one another.
SupposeIhadsaidtothenurses,“Yes,IseethatapersonIlovedeeplyisdeadandthatI’llneverseeheragain.ButIamfine:Iamnotdisturbedatall.”
Yet this is what we mean when we say that someone is "stoical." According to Nussbaum, we should have it the other way round.
virtueofwhichwecommitourselvestoviewingthingstheway
To have an emotion, first, one must first have a proposition that states how one sees things in the world. They may or may not be this way. Second, the emotion is complete when you make a judgment as to whether your proposition describes the world correctly or not.
23Notjustactionsbutalsomutualrelationsofcivicorpersonalphilia
Civic: Aristotle defines one of the elements of the eudaimonistic life as being political activity. I'm not sure if this is what she means here by "civic" but it comes to mind.
Onlyaninspectionofthethoughtswillhelpdiscriminate
Unless one has propositions giving a clear description of the situation one does not know one's emotion. One has only a general malaise.
theidentityofthewindaswinddoesnotdependontheparticular object against which it may pound
The essence of a story is what an agent does when facing adverse conditions--hopefully finding redemption in the end.
Thisviewisconnectedwiththeideathatemotionsderivefromthe“animal”partofournature,ratherthanfromaspecificallyhumanpart
Emotion is opposed to that other human attribute, Reason.
itmightseemverystrangetosuggestthatemotionsareformsofjudgment
Apparently, emotions are narratives as well, even if they are stories about things over which you have no apparent control. Nussbaum mentions earlier having done analysis of prisoners' narratives. Is the story the primordial form of reasoning for man?
Intersubjectivity is not found simply in the proximity of two or morepassive subjects, but is also an encounter between agents
Maybe they meant, or should have meant, "always an encounter between agents." Even the newborn baby has goals and desires which it negotiates for with its mother.
My bodily behaviour always has a public side to it.
Especially in the first year of life babies have an acute ability to read their mother's body language. This is especially true of gaze.
He suggeststhat we flesh this out in terms of pragmatic action: since my body is geared towards existing orpossible tasks, its spatiality ‘is not, like that of external objects or like that of “spatial sensations,”aspatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation
Our sense of space comes to us in terms of what it is we want to do.
if I don’t know where north is relativeto the way I am facing, then I don’t know which way Copenhagen is
Migrating birds are presumably egocentric, but how do they do it?
Patho-logical cases can function heuristically to make manifest what is normally simply taken forgranted.
By studying such abnormalities we can learn a great deal about how the normal brain functions.
The environment directly and indirectly regulatesthe body, so that the body is in some sense the expression or reflection of the environment.
Our body is part of our environment. At the same time because of our nervous system it is part of our mind. It is the part of the environment that one still thinks of as being oneself.
To be situated in the world means not simply to be locatedsomeplace in a physical environment, but to be in rapport with circumstances that are bodilymeaningful.
Hard to elaborate beyond what's there, but this may be the most significant sentence in the whole essay.
haptic
"of or rrelating to the sense of touch"
Whereas thelatter notion captures the body understood as an embodied first-person perspective, the formerfocuses on the body as seen from an observer’s point of view, where the observer may be ascientist, a physician, or even the embodied subject herself.
The problem is that these two, the corps objectif and the *corps vecu** are so intertwined in our consciousness as to make extricating one from the other impossible.
deeply implicated in our relation to the world
How could a brain-in-a-vat ever set out to explore?
their more recent initiatives are attempts to designrobots from the bottom up, building simple, pragmatically-ordered, biologically-inspired, sen-sorimotor machines that can move around environments by using information gathered in real-time from the environments themselves.
If they really want to develop artificial intelligence, then they need to develop robots that have goals and desires, that is, "machines" that can identify desirable objects in their environment and move to fulfill that desire.
Add to this the idea that the body ‘pre-processes’ and filters incoming sensory signals, and ‘post-processes’ and limits efferent signals that contribute to motor control.
How, for example, do we hear a tone and how do we integrate it into an extended melody? Or, how do we distinguish an object from its surroundings? Both mean that we sift irrelevant sensory input out, which requires making decisions, albeit unconsciously. Psychologists have succeeded in developing this into theories about both the visual and olfactory senses. Now we need one for the auditory sense.
Gibson (1986) developed the idea that objects in theenvironment can afford different kinds of action, given the kind of body that we have.
Gibson began with the problem of how airplane pilots integrate the panorama they see as it zooms in every direction during a landing. He later extended his insight to how we know when an object moves and yet keep a fixed awareness of our surroundings as opposed to moving our head. His students later extended this to show that the development of perception is dependent on our ability to move in the environment. Hence the kittens.
Even the pure brain-in-the-vat requires absolutely everything that the body normally provides – for example, sensory inputand life support. Indeed, the importance of the body can be measured in considering preciselywhat it would take to sustain a disembodied brain and the supposed experience that goes alongwith it.
The effort to remove the organism from its environment, after all, proves in vain. Having attempted to isolate the organism rather than consider how it interrelates to its environment, we find that we still face the same old issues.
It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoidas much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when they areabsolute necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature,purify ourselves from it until God himself gives us deliverance.
One of the passages that was used in the Middle Ages to defend the thesis that the mental was divine and the physical was base. How little progress we have made!
we could think that a robotic body could do just as well,as long as it were properly connected (by radio transmitters) to the artificial brain.
This is exactly what Descartes thought we did have!
Oncewe have the right information and the proper brain-replicating syntax, we should be able togenerate your cognitive experience in any machine that can run the program.
This is the grand hope of the A.I. project, but it seems to me that they are always basing the program on us and are hoping that they are at last abstracting the right program for reproducing human intelligence.
not only is the bodyunnecessary for experience and cognition, but we don’t even need the brain, as long as we havethe program and information running on the right kind of hardware.
Cartesian dualism is alive and well!