Curious Emotions: Roots of Consciousness
and Personality in motivated action is an important contribution to a
growing corpus of scholarship which is variously referred to as "dynamical
systems," "self-organization," or "embodiment"
approaches to understanding cognition and consciousness.  At the heart of the
book is a distinction between reactive and enactive accounts of
emotion.  Emotions are not mere reactions to stimuli; they involve and require
the active agency of a self-organizing system, a system that does not simply
react to its environment, but acts on it by continuously appropriating,
replacing, and organizing its own micro-constituents.

Ellis begins with an overview of
the enactivist approach, distinguishing conscious from pre-conscious emotional
intentionality, and emotions from motivations.  "An emotion," Ellis
writes, "is a process through which an organism monitors … how well it is
doing in … maintaining the various motivated patterns in its overall state, and
forms a sense of what needs to be done vis à vis the environment in
order to … maintain the particular self-organizing balance that is motivated"
(p. 28).  The second chapter further explicates the distinction between action
and (mere) reaction. "[E]motions are not merely responses to given
stimuli, but actively seek out usable environmental affordances" and "monitor
how well the total organism is doing in relation to its entire environmental
situation" (p. 47).  They "are ongoing, holistically motivated
processes that attempt to use environmental affordances to further their
self-organizational aims, which are built up … from the various needs that
arise for living organisms in maintaining their relatively stable patterns of
activity" (p. 47).  What’s more, considering the phenomena of selective
attention and inattentive blindness, Ellis defends the controversial thesis
that emotion and motivation ground all forms of consciousness.  The
third chapter distinguishes consummatory from non-consummatory motivations and
develops the notion of "extropy," the motivational tendency to
achieve homeostasis at relatively high levels of energy.  Extropy may sometimes
conflict with the tendency to satiate electrostatic needs as "a runner’s
interest in finishing a race" conflicts with "the fatigue, thirst,
and breathlessness pulling him in the opposite direction" (p. 89).  In
both the second and third chapters we see the beginnings of an account of mental
causation in terms of self-organization; Ellis returns to the problem of
mental causation throughout the book (especially chapters five and seven) and
we take up the issue in more detail below.  The fourth chapter develops a
theoretical account of the role and importance of non-consummatory motivations
in terms of dynamical systems theory distinguishing three types of affective
needs: homeostatic, boundary protection, and extropic needs.  According to Ellis,
"we can roughly classify all primary emotions in terms of regularly
occurring affective qualities that go with the thwarting or facilitation of
each of the three types of motives by either internal or external constraints"
(p. 104).  The fifth chapter investigates the relation between affect and
various senses of "self."  Of particular interest is Ellis’s
contention that all forms of consciousness require the initiation of action
commands that result in "unconscious action imagery." Even "perceptual
consciousness" depends "on emotion, motivation, and action-initiation
(which may then be inhibited) in order to be experienced subjectively" (p.
134).  The penultimate chapter focuses in on the most "existential"
and aesthetic non-consummatory emotions encountered in the fine arts, as well
as in psychotherapy. Psychological phenomena such as art appreciation and love
are considered with an eye to shedding light on the (general) nature of
affective intentionality.  For instance, it is argued that the working artist
tacitly understands that we perceive according to expectations, expectations
that are directed by our motivational interests.  In terms of the theoretical
framework Ellis is advancing, we might explain this as conscious perceptual
attention being directed by preconscious affective evaluations of affordances
in the field of perception. "Our emotions gear us up for action, and then
we search and scan the environment for relevant perceptual cues, which become
conscious to the extent that they resonate with image schemas" (p. 169).
The final chapter analyzes the relations between dynamical systems theory,
affect, and agency.  It is in this chapter that the issues of mental causation
and epiphenomenalism are given their final treatment and it is to these issues
that we now turn.

We can distinguish two sorts of
epiphenomenalist challenges.  On the one hand, there is what we might call
metaphysical epiphenomenalism according to which a) qualia are non-physical
phenomena, and b) the physical realm is closed to causal influence from
non-physical phenomena (see, e.g., Jackson 2002).  On the other hand, there is
what we might call folk-psychological or "out-of-the-loop"
epiphenomenalism which admits that qualia are physical phenomena, but maintains
that they are not part of the relevant causal processes; they are, as it were,
left out of the causal economy of the organism.

The challenge of metaphysical
epiphenomenalism can be met by taking qualia to be physical in nature.  For
example, according twofold-access theory (Feigl 1967; see also Dempsey 2004),
the relation between qualia and the brain is one of identity.  Conscious
phenomena are physical phenomena that can be accessed from two different
perspectives.  The (presumably) configurational and synchronic patterns
of neural activity that "correlate" with consciousness are both
objective objects of scientific disquisition and experiences for their
owners; from the perspective of the subject, they are lived through, enjoyed
or suffered.  In chapter three, it appears that Ellis adopts, in broad
outlines, just such a view when he writes that "[t]he "what it’s like"
component is the way things can appear only to the system initiating the action
commands that are presupposed by any consciousness.  The observing scientist also
initiates action commands, which subserve her own consciousness of what is
happening, but these are not the same action commands being initiated by the
subject of the experiment" (p. 100).

The challenge of out-of-the-loop
epiphenomenalism can take at least two forms: a) causal relevance is preempted
by the micro-physical level (e.g., Kim 1993), or b) consciousness comes too
late in the action cycle to meet common expectations about its causal relevance
(e.g., Libet 1999).  Ellis’s response to the problem of causal preemption is to
argue that a full account of agency will necessarily make reference to
self-organizing powers that are not simply reducible to the causal powers of
sub-personal brain processes.  Indeed, self-organizing systems have the "ability
to rearrange the background conditions under which one or another causal event
at the micro-level may or may not be sufficient for its consequents" (pp.
141-2).  According to the self-organizing systems account, consciousness and
affect are not mere passive reactions to bodily and sensory stimulation, but
are enactive, intimately connected with the guidance of attention and action.      The
"body’s overall self-organizing imbalances" can influence "the
background conditions on which the lower level events depend for their causal
sufficiency" (p. 191).  And more than any other, it is the emotional brain
systems that force "the micro-processes of the rest of the brain to
subordinate themselves to the purposes of the body as a whole" (p. 209). 
Thus, even if consciousness comes too late to meet some of our pre-theoretic
intuitions concerning its supposed causal power, Ellis insists that the threat
of causal preemption is significantly mitigated by the dynamical systems
approach.

Libet himself propounds one response
to the apparent late arrival of consciousness: conscious choice has a sort of veto
power over an action; likewise, according to Grey (2004), consciousness acts as
a sort of late error detector.  (However, Libet, unlike Grey, maintains
that free choice, even in the truncated context of vetoing actions, requires
ontological dualism between mind and body; as we just saw, such a view must
face the specter of metaphysical epiphenomenalism.)  Alternatively one might
take a decision to act to be, in effect, temporally extended.  According
to Jeannerod (1997), there is empirical evidence which indicates that imagining
an action requires first sending efferent action commands and then inhibiting
them.  A decision is not complete until an action command either is or is not
inhibited.  A free choice, on this view, involves "allowing an action to
go forward uninhibited" (p. 145).  According to Ellis, so long as
ontological monism is assumed, either alternative is consistent with the "dynamical
systems solution to the problem of mental causation, which … allows that the
person can have the power to control the interaction of micro-components"
(p. 146).   

In sum, Ellis’s Curious
Emotions: Roots of consciousness and personality in motivated action is an
exciting and thoughtful contribution to contemporary interdisciplinary
endeavors to understand conscious affect and its role in motivation and
agency.  For anyone interested in these topics, or in the dynamical systems
approach to cognitive science more generally, this book is a must-read.

 

References:

Dempsey, L.  (2004). Conscious Experience, Reduction, and
Identity: Many Explanatory

Gaps, One Solution, Philosophical
Psychology, 17, 225-245.

Feigl, H.  (1967).  The "Mental" and the "Physical":
the Essay with a Postscript, 

Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press.

Gray, J. (2004). Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard
Problem, Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Jackson, F.  (1982).  Epiphenomenal qualia.  Philosophical
Quarterly, 32, 127-36.

Jeannerod, M. (1997).  The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Action. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kim, J.  (1993).  The Non-reductivist’s Trouble’s with
Mental Causation.  In J. Heil and

A. Mele (Eds.) Mental Causation
(pp. 189-210).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Libet, B. (1999). Do we have Free Will? Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 6, 47-58.

 

© 2006 Liam
Dempsey

 Liam Dempsey,
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Dalhousie University, Halifax,
Nova Scotia CA

Categories: Philosophical