Curious Emotions: Roots of Consciousness and Personality in Motivated ActionEmotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs. (Series A) |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Some preliminary predictions of enactivism | 9 |
Conceptualizing action versus reaction | 18 |
CHAPTER 7 | 23 |
Preconscious emotional intentionality | 25 |
Aims objects triggers and symbolizationvehicles | 33 |
The roles of sensation interoception and sensorimotor | 42 |
Conflicting theories with conflicting empirical predictions | 57 |
Novelty constraints to freedom and the actionconsciousness | 115 |
The importance of extropy needs in higher mammals | 124 |
CHAPTER 5 | 131 |
How emotion grounds the various senses of self | 138 |
The embodied self and the personality | 150 |
How can there be knowledge of the self? | 158 |
CHAPTER 6 | 167 |
Why does art move and not just entertain? | 176 |
The P300 ERP as an operational definition | 63 |
The paradox of early and late selection | 69 |
Extropy and life wish in | 79 |
A nonreductive force? | 89 |
The humanistic notion of life wish | 95 |
CHAPTER 4 | 103 |
A closer look | 189 |
The emotional brain as an enactive system | 207 |
223 | |
103 | 231 |
233 | |
Other editions - View all
Curious Emotions: Roots of Consciousness and Personality in Motivated Action Ralph D. Ellis No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
action affordances action commands action imagery affective aims already amygdala anger attention background conditions basic basins of attraction behavior causal closure causal relations causal sequences cause cerebellum chemical cognitive components concept consummatory drives cortex cortical Damasio efferent Ellis emotional brain areas enactive theories enactivism energy level energy-efficient environment environmental example existential experience extropy feeling felt sense frontal functions higher-order holistic homeostasis homeostatic hypothalamus inattentional blindness input intentional object intentionality interoceptive kind lobe loops Mack and Rock maintain means mechanisms mental merely micro-components micro-constituents micro-level micro-mechanisms motivated multiply realizable needed negentropy neurotransmitters Newton non-consummatory notion novelty occipital occipital lobe occur organism organism's organizational overall Panksepp parietal parietal lobe perceptual consciousness person physical physiological play pleasure possible processing proprioceptive purposes reactions reactive response result satiation seek selection self-maintaining self-organizing system sensory serotonin specific structure subcortical subjective subserve substrata subsystems tendency thalamus theorists tion trigger
Popular passages
Page 224 - Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing up to the hard problem of consciousness.