Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis

[Fred H.]

MM: We do use our intellect frequently in our lives. But when? I propose that we mostly use intellect when strong emotions are not involved in a decision.

Indeed! And that’s why we must utilize our rational downward causation to establish our morality, to determine what it is that is right and wrong, enabling us to know what it means to be morally responsible b/f we encounter the difficulties and stresses of life.

I’m impressed Margaret. Your above comment indicates that your understanding of this area has evolved since you’ve begun this thread, and you now seem to understand and acknowledge that your original so-called hypothesis—that “we do that which we most want to do, emotionally”—in addition to being circular and somewhat vacuous, also erroneously ignored the impact of the third part of the mental trilogy, our more recently evolved human cognitive consciousness/intellect, by which we humans are able to rationally reason, discern truth, and from which freewill seems to emerge (although you yourself may not yet completely accept the freewill thing). I think the LeDoux’s book may have been tremendously helpful in your evolution.

And considering that you’ve also recently changed your mind regarding intelligence differences, more or less now acknowledging that intelligent differences are indeed real (mostly due to JimB’s suggestion that you read Pinker’s book I think), I must say that I’m pleasantly surprised—you’re learning and growing. That’s downward causation for you. Congratulations.

[Carey N]

Damn. How complicated can this get?

Perhaps now you see the point I was trying to make with empirical testing (and why it is so important). Without it, we're grasping in the dusk.

[From an earlier post]What the study actually showed was that my hypothesis is probably correct

Acknowledging that you've changed your stance on that particular study since posting this quote, the language itself does pretty clearly demonstrate that you're in the "correct/incorrect" mindset, just as much as I. This, of course, is a good thing (and it doesn't necessitate animosity of any kind) . . . otherwise we'd just be throwing crazy ideas around all the time.

Regarding Todd's post, I see that he was referring to the conventional wisdom of intellect/emotion separationas a "serious error". However, it does seem to me that you still treat intellect and emotion as two completely separate entities (that interact with each other). My interpretation of Todd's early post is that having different names for emotion and intellect might not even be conceptually correct, according to recent neuroscientific evidence. I would, however defer to Todd on this one.

[Fred H.]

Found one of my old posts from 2/25/03 that’s somewhat relevant to this thread—

Damasio Selects Spinoza Fred H. · 02/25/03 at 3:04 PM ET
I’ve been reading Damasio’s new book, “Looking for Spinoza” (Harcourt, 2003); another great book with lots of great stuff to ponder; I highly recommend it. Here’s one area (of many) I found interesting:

In confronting our suffering and our need for salvation, in addition to Spinoza’s requirement that we live “a virtuous life assisted by a political system whose laws help the individual with the task of being fair and charitable to others,” Damasio writes (pg 275):

“The Spinoza solution also asks the individual to attempt a break between the emotionally competent stimuli that trigger negative emotions--passions such as fear, anger, jealousy, sadness--and the very mechanisms that enact emotion. Instead, the individual should substitute emotionally competent stimuli capable of triggering positive, nourishing emotions. To facilitate this goal, Spinoza recommends the mental rehearsing of negative emotional stimuli as a way to build a tolerance for negative emotions and gradually acquire a knack for generating positive ones. [Wow!--Exposure/CBT, circa 1670, but without the cognitive distortions.] This is, in effect, Spinoza as mental immunologist developing a vaccine capable of creating antipassion antibodies.”

Additionally, Damasio writes: “The individual must be aware of the fundamental separation between emotionally competent stimuli and the trigger mechanism [which, as current neuroscience now shows, includes amgdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cinguate] of emotion so that he can substitute ‘reasoned’ emotionally competent stimuli capable of producing the most positive feeling states.”

In an earlier part of the book (pg 58) Damasio discusses triggering and executing emotion and writes that after the presentation of an emotionally competent object, regardless of how fleeting the presentation:

“...signals related to the presence of that stimulus are made available to the emotion-triggering sites....You can conceive of those sites as locks that open only if appropriate keys fit. The emotionally competent stimuli are the keys, of course. Note that they select a preexisting lock, rather than instruct the brain on how to create one. The emotion-triggering sites subsequently activate a number of emotion-execution sites...[which are] the immediate cause of the emotional state that occurs in the body and the brain regions that [then] support the emotion-feeling process."

He goes on to say that these “descriptions sound a lot like that of an antigen entering the blood stream and leading to an immune response....And well they should because the processes are formally similar. In the case of emotion, the ‘antigen’ is presented through the sensory system and the ‘antibody’ is the emotional response. The ‘selection’ is made at one of the several brain sites equipped to trigger an emotion. The conditions in which the process occurs are comparable, the contour of the process is the same, and the results are just as beneficial. Nature is not that inventive when it comes to successful solutions. Once it works, it tries it again and again.”

[TomJrzk]

Originally Posted by Margaret McGhee

We do use our intellect frequently in our lives. But when? I propose that we mostly use intellect when strong emotions are not involved in a decision.

Originally Posted by Fred H.

I’m impressed Margaret. Your above comment indicates that your understanding of this area has evolved since you’ve begun this thread, and you now seem to understand and acknowledge that your original so-called hypothesis—that “we do that which we most want to do, emotionally”—in addition to being circular and somewhat vacuous, also erroneously ignored the impact of the third part of the mental trilogy, our more recently evolved human cognitive consciousness/intellect, by which we humans are able to rationally reason, discern truth, and from which freewill seems to emerge (although you yourself may not yet completely accept the freewill thing).

This [yours Fred] is such a ridiculous statement that I hate to even acknowledge it. But, since Margaret is ignoring you, I must: we all understand that humans have intellect, the question that you're glossing over is where it comes from. We believe that intellect itself is deterministic, merely the result of the current conditions in our brains, you insist there is some make-believe component to it that creates free will. You have yet to prove where that component comes from and I've pointed out data that contradict a free will; some of which you've agreed with. You're wrong, Fred.

[Fred H.]

[Carey to Margaret]: Acknowledging that you've changed your stance on that particular study since posting this quote, the language itself does pretty clearly demonstrate that you're in the "correct/incorrect" mindset, just as much as I. This, of course, is a good thing (and it doesn't necessitate animosity of any kind) . . . otherwise we'd just be throwing crazy ideas around all the time.

It occurs to me, Carey, that we may actually have had some positive impact (maybe in a kind of good cop/bad cop kind of way?) on Margaret’s understanding of these issues. Congratulations. It also occurs to me that seeing as how this forum has had quite an impact on the evolution of Margaret’s understanding of things, perhaps she should consider thanking JimB for making this forum available, for his input, and perhaps she should also consider apologizing to Jim for her initial cheap shots and playing the racist card when he originally brought up the intelligence differences topic (assuming her sense of fairness and graciousness has also adequately evolved)?

[Fred H.]

TomJ: I've pointed out data that contradict a free will….

Yeah, and that mass murderers aren’t morally responsible for their behavior.

[TomJrzk]

Originally Posted by Fred H.

Yeah, and that mass murderers aren’t morally responsible for their behavior.

My quote was 'not ultimately responsible'. They as social members, comprising everything that was given them by their genes and environment, ARE responsible. But they are responsible as persons for neither their genes nor their environment and neither are you. So, you're right, they are not ultimately responsible; and given the same everything, you would have done the exact same things.

[Fred H.]

TomJ: My quote was 'not ultimately responsible'.

Yeah, you’ve said both—you seem to also lack a sense of responsibility to account accurately for what you’ve said—here’re some reminders—

TomJ: But, yes, I feel that they [various mass murderers, e.g., Stalin, Hitler, etc.] are not morally responsible…. [http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/sh...&postcount=20]

TomJ: Yes, humans have no 'moral' responsibility…. [http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/sh...&postcount=22]

TomJ: If you have no free will, you have no 'morals' beyond the instincts that have been bred into us as social animals…. [http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/sh...&postcount=24]

[TomJrzk]

Originally Posted by Fred H.

Yeah, you’ve said both

You're right, I left the tics off the first "morally", which was an oversight, not an admission. But I explained earlier that I don't talk about 'morals' since religious folk have overloaded the term; there's no such thing as morals if they have to come from an 'objective' source, which, by the way, has to be 'God'. If you want to use 'morals' to mean the social instincts that the last 7 of the 10 commandments were built from, then I have no issue.

It's interesting that you'd take such an oversight as a character flaw when you knew that I meant 'ultimately responsible'...

[ToddStark]

... I'm just catching up on this interesting discussion, as time allows.

Just for the record, although "polite" is a compliment I won't reject out of hand, I really wasn't biting my tongue with Margaret. I was honestly reserving judgment because there are some fundamental concepts that I seem to think of very differently and I want to avoid misunderstanding as far as practical.

"Emotion" and "Intellect" both have a long history as concepts, and for most of that history they have been defined in intuitive and phenomenological terms rather than operational or technical terms. Failing to make them technical risks our slide into compelling illusions that represent how we explain our own behavior to ourselves but probably not what actually drives our behavior. We know from a great deal of evidence from various lines that the engines of explanation and the engines of behavior are different mechanisms in human beings. On the other hand, making intellect and emotional into technical ideas risks the not lesser crime of "destroying" the phenomena we care about examining, in a similar manner to that in which early behaviorists temporarily "destroyed" mental and cognitive phenomena.

I suspect that Margaret and I make different tradeoffs on the technical definition of the concepts. She relies more on her intuition about what emotions and intellect represent, and I think I do share her intuitions, but I am also more skeptical of them. So I look for experimental evidence about the details of the decision making process, but I tend to try to avoid interpreting them as evidence for a battle between intellect and emotion.

My exposure to the literature relevant to human decision making has left me with the impression that it is divided roughly in half. Cognitive and social psychology on one hand, and political psychology on the other hand.

The cognitive psychology and social psychology tradition, which I am most familiar with and comfortable with, treats human rationality as flawed for various reasons, converging on the idea that various things lead us to use shortcuts in our reasoning. This includes but is not limited to extremes of emotions, and also includes a tendency to be overconfident in our own opinions, to use stereotyped modes of thinking to reject new evidence, to rely on seemingly superficial markers of credibility, and so on.

The political psychology literature agrees that human beings use shortcuts and heuristics, but tends to take the view that these are adaptive, that people actually make better decisions together because of the shortcuts and sometimes even when we avoid reasoning.

I think there is a lot to be said for both of these viewpoints, and I agree with a lot in each of them. Much of the literature in both camps shares at least one important concept, the notion that human beings vary between a high attention, high motivation mode of thinking (central processing) and a low attention, low motivation mode of thinking (peripheral processing). They disagree on the implications of this, and the value associated with central vs. peripheral processing.

I bring this up in part to suggest that the more operational and technical distinction in human decision making might be better stated as central vs. peripheral processing rather than intellect and emotion.

And Margaret is right, I am usually very little concerned about who wins arguments here, and I usually find them annoying rather than stimulating. I do enjoy a well made argument, even when I disagree, which is why I can usually tolerate Fred for a while even though we eventually annoy each other into oblivion in nearly every thread. He does often argue very well, and I learn from that.

kind regards,

Todd