“Neuroscience has much to learn from Hume’s philosophy of emotions” By Richard C. Shais [Psyche]

“Neuroscience has much to learn from Hume’s philosophy of emotions

https://psyche.co/ideas/neuroscience-has-much-to-learn-from-humes-philosophy-of-emotions

Richard C. Shais professor of literature and an affiliate professor of philosophy, as well as an affiliate of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, all at the American University in Washington, DC. His books include Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1830 (2009) and Imagination and Science in Romanticism (2018).

We are in the midst of a second Humean revolution. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions …’ By ‘passions’, Hume meant what we now call emotions. What gave him such faith in the passions that he could accept reason’s enslavement to them? Hume understood reason to be incapable of producing any action, and the passions to be the source of our motivations. So he insisted that we must attend to the passions if we want to understand how anything gets done. Much recent neuroscience has found that human rationality is weaker than is commonly presumed, and the emotions make it possible to make decisions by granting certain objects salience. Why does this second Humean revolution matter and what, if anything, can the second revolution learn from the first?

By and large, scientists until recently avoided the emotions as too subjective, too imprecisely defined. Yet once Darwinian evolution and neuroscience supported the link of emotion to action, emotions began to gain more attention from scientists. In his book The Strange Order of Things (2018), Antonio Damasio, one of the most influential neuroscientists today, defines the affects and emotions as ‘action programmes’, and by this he connects emotions to homeostasis, the process by which we keep ourselves alive. How better to grant the emotions scientific weight than to make them the key to human survival? Neuroscience also supports a growing recognition of the connections between the brain’s perceptual and motor systems; this has led scholars such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Andy Clark and Shaun Gallagher – ‘enactivists’ who argue that human thought is not brainbound but stems from connections between the mind and body and its environment – to conclude, to varying degrees, that human perceptions are for the purpose of action. Sometimes, however, I just want to look at something, not reduce it to a tool.

(…)

Habits consolidate what control we can have of our passions. Hume gives habit pride of place in his moral accounting, but the key here is to continually assess whether we have the right habits, not to passively accept existing habits. ‘Nothing can be more laudable,’ he writes, ‘than to have a value for ourselves, where we really have qualities that are valuable.’ In other words, he asks for empirical evidence of value, not just for our feeling of it. Habits, after all, make it possible to contain violent passions such as anger. Hume insists that ‘when a passion has once become a settled principle of action, and is the predominant inclination of the soul, it commonly produces no longer any sensible agitation’. In this view, habit reduces passion’s agitations, making them manageable.

Hume’s idea that reason serves the passions has in important ways found scientific support. Our rationality serves our passions, and we have less control over the passions than is commonly presumed. By stipulating that reason is the slave of the passions, Hume warns us of the consequences of not having the right habits. When neuroscientists equate emotion and action, it narrows emotion to survival and underestimates the ways in which the emotions can foster deliberation. While neuroscientists set the timescale of the emotions to no more than a few minutes, Hume insists that it will take nothing less than a lifetime to get our emotions right.”

“A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything | Karl Friston takes us on a safari of his free-energy principle” [Nautilus]

“A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything

Karl Friston takes us on a safari of his free-energy principle.

By Brian Gallagher

June 10, 2020

http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/a-neuroscientists-theory-of-everything

(…)

In “The Free-Energy Principle,” you write the world is uncertain and full of surprises. Action and human perception, you argue, are all about minimizing surprise. Why is it important that things—including us—minimize surprise?

If we minimize surprise now, then on average over time, we’re minimizing the average surprise, which is the average entropy. If a thermostat could have beliefs about what its world is—it might say, “My world is living at 22 degrees centigrade”—so any sensory information from its thermal receptors that departs from that is surprising. It will then act on the world to try and minimize that surprise and bring that prediction error back to zero. Your body’s homeostasis is doing exactly the same thing.

Does the brain minimize surprise in order to conserve energy?

You could certainly say that. But I wouldn’t quite put it like that. It’s not that the brain has a goal to exist. It just exists. It looks as if it has a goal to exist. What does existing mean? It’s always found in that configuration. The brain has to sample the world in a way that it knows what’s going to happen next. If it didn’t, you’d be full of surprises and you’d die.

(…)

The Markov blanket helps explain how things can exist—but what is it, exactly?

The Markov blanket is a permeable interface between the inside and the outside, a two-way exchange. Stuff on the outside—the environment, the universe, the heat bath—impacts what’s going on on the inside via the sensory part of the Markov blanket. The Markov blanket has sensory and active states. Stuff on the outside, the external states, influence the blanket’s sensory states, what the blanket senses. And stuff on the inside of the blanket, the internal states, influence the blanket’s active states. The active states close that circle of causality, or, if you like, they disclose what’s going on on the inside by acting on the outside state. With that mathematical construct in place, you can go a lot further than 20th-century physics, which was all about equilibrium statistics and thermodynamics, the kind of physics that you would have been taught in school. Implicit in that is the notion that you’ve got an isolated or a closed system. That implicitly assumed the Markov blanket.

(…)

How do Markov blankets help make sense of our inner life?

I have to be clear that I’m speaking as a physicist would, because I’m not a philosopher. That said, there is a representationalist interpretation of the internal states of something with a Markov blanket. You could say that all that matters in terms of sentience, perception, and active inference, is just on the inside. It’s our neuronal activity, say, the internal states that are negotiating dependent upon and influencing the blanket states that comprise our sensory states, our sensory receptors—our sensorium if you like—and ways of changing that sensorium through acting. Like my eyes palpating, sampling the world to get new sensory information. That would mean that it is never going to be the case that you’re going to be able to transparently sample—or know—what is out there, generating those sensory blanket states. You could actually adopt an anti-realist position about external reality. You will never know the difference.

(…)

This brings you back to this notion that anything you talk about is really just an explanation for your lived world. It’s the simplest explanation for all of these sensations that I’m getting, in all the modalities that I possess. And it doesn’t have to be true or false. As long as it’s a good-enough explanation that keeps your surprise down and self-evidence nice and high—that’s all it’s required to do. Selfhood in itself now becomes just another explanation. Anything that a philosopher says also succumbs to exactly the same argument, including qualia. These are now reifications of the best explanation for my understanding of my sensory data and my internal view in this inner life. The highest form of consciousness is the philosopher’s brain.

(…)

Is the self an illusion?

Well, say you’re a feral child who’s never seen another mammal. There would be no need to have a notion of self. You and the universe would just be one thing. But as soon as you start to notice other things that look like you, a question has to be resolved, “Did you do that or did I do that?” Now you need to have, as part of your generative model, the hypothesis of fantasy, the illusion—which may be absolutely right—that there are other things like me out there, and I need to resolve that. I think the theory of mind on the necessity of encultured brains provides a simple answer as to why we have self. But to come back to your question, I think, yes, selfhood is another really plausible hypothesis for my generative model that provides the best explanation for your sensory exchanges.”

“Social status helped and hindered by the same behaviors and traits worldwide” [University of Texas at Austin/Medical Xpress]

“Social status helped and hindered by the same behaviors and traits worldwide

by University of Texas at Austin

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-social-status-hindered-behaviors-traits.html

(…)

“Humans live in a social world in which relative rank matters for nearly everything—your access to resources, your ability to attract mates, and even how long you live,” said UT Austin evolutionary psychologist David Buss, one of the study’s lead authors. “From an evolutionary perspective, reproductively relevant resources flow to those high in status and trickle slowly, if at all, to those lower on the social totem pole.”

The researchers compared people’s impressions of 240 factors—including acts, characteristics and events—to determine what increased and impaired a person’s esteem in the eyes of others. They found that certain qualities such as being honest, hard-working, kind, intelligent, having a wide range of knowledge, making sacrifices for others, and having a good sense of humor increased a person’s social value.

“From the Gypsies in Romania to the native islanders of Guam, people displaying intelligence, bravery and leadership rise in rank in the eyes of their peers,” said UT Austin psychology graduate student Patrick Durkee, who led the study with Buss. “But possessing qualities that inflict costs on others will cause your status to plummet, whether you live in Russia or Eritrea.”

Being known as a thief, as dirty or unclean, as mean or nasty, acquiring a sexually transmitted disease, and bringing shame on one’s family decreased a person’s social status or value. These status-harming actions can also lead to a person being ostracized from the group—”an action that would have meant near-certain death in ancestral environments,” the researchers said.

“Although this study was conducted prior to the current pandemic, it’s interesting that being a disease vector is universally detrimental to a person’s status,” Buss said. “Socially transmitted diseases are evolutionarily ancient challenges to human survival, so humans have psychological adaptations to avoid them. Lowering a person’s social status is an evolutionarily ancient method of social distancing from disease vectors.”

***

David M. Buss et al, Human status criteria: Sex differences and similarities across 14 nations., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2020).  

DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000206

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000206

“Trump, the politics of fear and racism: How our brains can be manipulated to tribalism” by Arash Javanbakht [The Conversation]

“Trump, the politics of fear and racism: How our brains can be manipulated to tribalism

by Arash Javanbakht
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University

The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/trump-the-politics-of-fear-and-racism-how-our-brains-can-be-manipulated-to-tribalism-139811

(…)

Fear is arguably as old as life. It is deeply ingrained in the living organisms that have survived extinction through billions of years of evolution. Its roots are deep in our core psychological and biological being, and it is one of our most intimate feelings. Danger and war are as old as human history, and so are politics and religion.

I am a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specializing in fear and trauma, and I have some thoughts on how politics, fear and tribalism are intertwined in the current events.

We learn fear from tribe mates

Like other animals, humans can learn fear from experience, such as being attacked by a predator, or witnessing a predator attacking another human. Furthermore, we learn fear by instructions, such as being told there is a predator nearby.

Learning from our tribe mates is an evolutionary advantage that has prevented us from repeating dangerous experiences of other humans. We have a tendency to trust our tribe mates and authorities, especially when it comes to danger. It is adaptive: Parents and wise old men told us not to eat a special plant, or not to go to an area in the woods, or we would be hurt. By trusting them, we would not die like a great-grandfather who died eating that plant. This way, we accumulated knowledge.

Tribalism has been an inherent part of human history, and is closely linked with fear. There has always been competition between groups of humans in different ways and with different faces, from brutal wartime nationalism to a strong loyalty to a football team. Evidence from cultural neuroscience shows that our brains even respond differently at an unconscious level simply to the view of faces from other races or cultures.

At a tribal level, people are more emotional and consequently less logical: Fans of both teams pray for their team to win, hoping God will take sides in a game. On the other hand, we regress to tribalism when afraid. This is an evolutionary advantage that would lead to the group cohesion and help us fight the other tribes to survive.

Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts. Abuse of fear has killed in many faces: extreme nationalism, Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan and religious tribalism have all led to heartless killing of millions.

The typical pattern is to give the other humans a different label than us, perceive them as less than us, who are going to harm us or our resources, and to turn the other group into a concept. It does not have to necessarily be race or nationality. It can be any real or imaginary difference: liberals, conservatives, Middle Easterners, white men, the right, the left, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs. The list goes on and on.

(…)

Fear is uninformed, illogical and often dumb

Very often my patients with phobias start with: “I know it is stupid, but I am afraid of spiders.” Or it may be dogs or cats, or something else. And I always reply: “It is not stupid, it is illogical.” We humans have different functions in the brain, and fear oftentimes bypasses logic. In situations of danger, we ought to be fast: First run or kill, then think.

This human tendency is meat to the politicians who want to exploit fear: If you grew up only around people who look like you, only listened to one media outlet and heard from the old uncle that those who look or think differently hate you and are dangerous, the inherent fear and hatred toward those unseen people is an understandable (but flawed) result.

(…)

By scaring us, the demagogues turn on our aggression toward “the others,” whether in the form of vandalizing their temples, harassing them on the social media, of killing them in cold blood.

When demagogues manage to get hold of our fear circuitry, we often regress to illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves—weapons that politicians use for their own agenda.

The irony of evolution is that while those attached to tribal ideologies of racism and nationalism perceive themselves as superior to others, in reality they are acting on a more primitive, less evolved and more animal level.”