Feelings

[Carol]

If we were brains in a vat would have feelings?  

[stryder]

If we were brains in a vat would have feelings?  

If you consider the nature of evolution, the ability to feel is derived from the need to have sensation of our extremities.  Without the capability of sensing our bounds we'd find ourselves incapable of knowing when we were injured, or if we fit without damaging ourselves etc.

If a brain was applied to a vat (cut from someones body) then it's likely that it would either be subjected to a high level of stimuli caused by the nerve tissues being severed (and thereby damaged) or no sensation at all (similar to Paraplegics).  Reading University did do a Robo-rodent, where the brain of a rat was used inside a robot chassis.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1-0eZytv6Qk


I couldn't tell you how much data retention the rat's brain actually had about being a rat itself, however it certainly functions in relationship to the stimuli that's used to make it function as a brain.

One often pondered perception in online forums is where we are all just a simulation of thoughts in some vat of goop (a brain) however this rationalization is often left to dreamers and scifi fanatics to ponder the possibilities rather than being seen as a reality.

[Carol]

I like your evolutionary approach, which is totally missing in another forum where I brought up this question of our bodies and minds and feelings.  It spun out of a discussion of God.  Someone believes in a loving God, so I questioned is this possible if God does not have a body?  What you said about how we evolved with feelings necessary to our survival makes sense to me.  The rat brain in the video link is responding like the robotic vacuums that can sense obstacles and pull away from them, and we would not say that electrical robots have feelings.  Hum, now I am questioning myself.  When is a sensor a feeling?  

When I googled for information about the brain/body connection and feelings, I got information about emotions.  But if a neighbor tells me her cat died, I don't feel a thing.  I don't care.  On the other hand, when I think of my dog that died a few months ago, I may feel nothing, or I can start crying and I know that emotional response is a body thing.  The body thing can be triggered by a thought, but I swear it is not a feeling until I feel it.  It also isn't a feeling equal to jerking my hand back from a hot frying pan handle.  Avoiding a burnt hand doesn't involve a lot of thought or emotion, but hopefully, the experience becomes a memory that will help me avoid pain in the future.  Oh no, now I have this whole question tangled up with memory.  Exasperation- I feel like Brier Rabbit getting all tangled up with the tar baby.  We can have painful memories, but when that is so, isn't the pain physical, requiring a body?

[C C]

If we were brains in a vat would have feelings?  

The BIV thought experiment entails sensory impulses (whether the sources are faux or real) being inputted to the vatted brain in place of a non-virtual body / environment which would otherwise be supplying that information.

From the standpoint that we already know that actual neural tissue is capable of having such associated with it, then computer simulations of brains that acquired "manifestations" (feelings, qualia, and assorted shown experiences) might thereby be more interesting or intriguing.

The sim-brain would ultimately rest in the manipulation of electricity by the computer's components, thereby leaving little doubt anymore that electromagnetism is what the phenomenal presences dwelt in (if going the non-dualism route of avoiding a higher, immaterial level supervening upon the physical operations).

But even narrowing it down to electrically charged affairs would hardly amount to a sufficient explanation lacking loose ends, since physics still would not detect any new properties that the applicable agencies of matter had acquired. The behavior of the system in reporting that it had feelings and experiences, would be the result of its outward dynamic organization and complex, reciprocal patterns. The mechanistic action and structure combo is not anything radically new in the world. Only the personal manifestations of consciousness are novel, which are internally present to that system and not other systems outside it (who just get the typical external relations view of biological stuff, computer circuitry, etc).

I make a distinction between "feelings as emotions" and "feelings with tactile or inner somatic sensation content". The former doesn't necessarily have to represent body-status with any exhibited content at all (stomach pain, sore elbow, fatigue, feverish, etc). If a person is angry, for instance, there are body-state feelings associated with it but we usually focus on the influence that the emotional disposition has on inner thoughts or the outward actions of the individual. Even sadness seems a generalization of the negative thinking and withdrawn or other symptomatic behavior of the person.

Thus I focused largely on the non-emotional meaning of feeling above. Because emotional dispositions can simply be programmed into the sim-brain (automatically triggered in response to _X_ circumstances), so as to influence its thoughts and actions. If stipulating that emotions must have phenomenal content (body sensations to them), then that instead becomes the other challenge which is either not so easily remedied or would lack sufficient explanation if the qualitative manifestations did arise.

- - -

[Syne]

Just because we feel sensations in our bodies that correlate to certain emotions doesn't mean that those emotions originate in that part of the body.

[Carol]

If we were brains in a vat would have feelings?  

The BIV thought experiment entails sensory impulses (whether the sources are faux or real) being inputted to the vatted brain in place of a non-virtual body / environment which would otherwise be supplying that information.

From the standpoint that we already know that actual neural tissue is capable of having such associated with it, then computer simulations of brains that acquired "manifestations" (feelings, qualia, and assorted shown experiences) might thereby be more interesting or intriguing.

The sim-brain would ultimately rest in the manipulation of electricity by the computer's components, thereby leaving little doubt anymore that electromagnetism is what the phenomenal presences dwelt in (if going the non-dualism route of avoiding a higher, immaterial level supervening upon the physical operations).

But even narrowing it down to electrically charged affairs would hardly amount to a sufficient explanation lacking loose ends, since physics still would not detect any new properties that the applicable agencies of matter had acquired. The behavior of the system in reporting that it had feelings and experiences, would be the result of its outward dynamic organization and complex, reciprocal patterns. The mechanistic action and structure combo is not anything radically new in the world. Only the personal manifestations of consciousness are novel, which are internally present to that system and not other systems outside it (who just get the typical external relations view of biological stuff, computer circuitry, etc).

I make a distinction between "feelings as emotions" and "feelings with tactile or inner somatic sensation content". The former doesn't necessarily have to represent body-status with any exhibited content at all (stomach pain, sore elbow, fatigue, feverish, etc). If a person is angry, for instance, there are body-state feelings associated with it but we usually focus on the influence that the emotional disposition has on inner thoughts or the outward actions of the individual. Even sadness seems a generalization of the negative thinking and withdrawn or other symptomatic behavior of the person.

Thus I focused largely on the non-emotional meaning of feeling above. Because emotional dispositions can simply be programmed into the sim-brain (automatically triggered in response to _X_ circumstances), so as to influence its thoughts and actions. If stipulating that emotions must have phenomenal content (body sensations to them), then that instead becomes the other challenge which is either not so easily remedied or would lack sufficient explanation if the qualitative manifestations did arise.

- - -

My head went through so many thoughts while reading your post I lost track of them.

The one that stands out most is a question about what is reality?  For sure it is not necessarily what we think it is because our brains can play tricks on us and they can be so easily deceived.   Our whole thinking process can be hijacked by emotions or a memory of pain,  and I do associate emotions/pain with physical sensation.   Without a brain, we wouldn't be conscious of emotions and pain, but without a body, there would be nothing to be conscious of.  A computer may learn the behaviors of an angry person, but the feeling?

To me, this was the most interesting part of your post.

I make a distinction between "feelings as emotions" and "feelings with tactile or inner somatic sensation content". The former doesn't necessarily have to represent body-status with any exhibited content at all (stomach pain, sore elbow, fatigue, feverish, etc). If a person is angry, for instance, there are body-state feelings associated with it but we usually focus on the influence that the emotional disposition has on inner thoughts or the outward actions of the individual. Even sadness seems a generalization of the negative thinking and withdrawn or other symptomatic behavior of the person. 

I think a reason mental health counseling has failed for many people is the result of thinking our emotional problems are in our heads, rather than in our bodies.  This is so complex, I feel like throwing up my hands and giving up.  I ask for your mercy as I stumble through my thoughts and try to make sense of them.  

How we experience life as a child is very much a physical/emotional memory of who we are and what we have been through.  So a child who grows up with security and has enriching experiences resulting in good feelings about him/her self and others, will form this into the individual's opinion about who s/he is and what life is.    I have read we know who we are by looking inward and checking the feeling of our being.  Yap, I recognize this body as mine.   
Around age 40 I experienced post trauma syndrome and for awhile experienced myself as several different personalities.  I won't bore you with that story.  I will just say, the trauma happened when I was preverbal and I had no story to explain what happened to me.  If my mother had not told me I was put in body cast for a year of age, I would have had no way to reference the memory and no explanation for the emotions that were disrupting my life when my hip deteriorated so badly I needed an operation.   There was no way for me or anyone else to identify the cause of my breakdown, until I collected enough information and could tell a counselor where the problem began.  

When we rely on rationalizations for our life story, they can be totally inaccurate!  A way around this is seeing a counselor who deals with linguistics- how we talk to ourselves and the life story we tell ourselves.  We can rewrite our life story and change our lives.  We might not be aware of vitally important information.   There may be no rational explanation for our feelings, and it is our feelings that tell us what is so for us.   I believe these feeling memories are held in our body with or without a verbal explanation of them.

On the other hand, we can change how we feel (emotional state) including our sense of safety and self-confidence with exercise and posture.   There is plenty of research to verify this.  There is a strong relationship between our physical experience and our emotional experience.  That is, there is a relationship between our bodies and minds, and it might be better to think in terms of that relationship, rather than focusing on what is happening in our brain, or what we think is happening in our body.

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Just because we feel sensations in our bodies that correlate to certain emotions doesn't mean that those emotions originate in that part of the body.

Emotions may be the result of a thought, but that thought lacks meaning without a physical response.  

Young people are better at collecting facts than old people, but having a lot of facts of our heads does not equal understanding the meaning of them.  Life experience is vital to understanding meaning.  A young person may score high on a test that is testing the memory of facts rather than comprehension of them.   The older person will likely not remember many facts but will go and on about the meaning of a fact or two.

[Syne]

Emotions may be the result of a thought, but that thought lacks meaning without a physical response.  

Young people are better at collecting facts than old people, but having a lot of facts of our heads does not equal understanding the meaning of them.  Life experience is vital to understanding meaning.  A young person may score high on a test that is testing the memory of facts rather than comprehension of them.   The older person will likely not remember many facts but will go and on about the meaning of a fact or two.

Thought is what gives meaning. Without thought, all you have is sensation. You can have the exact same physical response all day, but until you recognize its connection to a specific emotion, it has little meaning. Granted, your recognition may be largely subconscious.

Facts without understanding are like sensations without meaning. The young are eager to seek out new sensations, regardless of meaning or consequences. The old have already sought out enough sensations to prioritize them.

[confused2]

I was rather disturbed by the youtube where a rat brain was used as a neural network to control a simple robot. In the actual clip I think just a few cells were used but following the theme it gets worse and worse. Once you decide something (in this case rats) has no value you're on a slippery slope - where are you going to draw the line? Does (for example) Syne have any value? I don't think it is my responsibility to choose whether or not Syne has a value. The consequence of the absence of responsibility (and the complete lack of control) is that my quality of life is mostly (99.999%) determined by things outside myself and beyond my control. With age I seem to have (almost) completely lost the interest and ability to 'look in'. There's so much fantastic stuff 'out there'. I have a pair of seagulls nesting about 10 feet from where I am now. I'm lucky but with a slice of bread you can be anywhere and get some of the best friends you're ever likely to make. There's birds on roofs and in bushes. There's probably rats most places too but I'm not going to suggest making friends with them - even though I rather like their company (my wife must never find this out though). There's beauty everywhere. The sunrise is free but you have to be up early to see it.

[Secular Sanity]

I agree with C C.  I think that’s pretty close to the same distinction that Antonio Damasio makes.

The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins

Feelings reference physiological states. From antiquity to the present day, introspective analysis reported in philosophical writings, literary works and scientific observations reveals that descriptions of feelings tend to reference states of the body. The repertoire of feelings includes thirst, food and air hunger (the urge to breathe), different kinds of pleasure and pain, disgust, fear, sadness and joy, as well as complex social responses such as contempt, shame, compassion and admiration. By contrast, experiences related to exteroceptive senses (vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell) commonly cause emotions and ensuing feelings but are not feelings in and of themselves.

The CNS continually monitors our interior and exterior environments. Changes in the internal environment (for example, the degree of contraction of visceral muscles, heart rate, levels of metabolites in the internal milieu, and so on) are sensed by the interoceptive system4, signaled to sensory regions of the CNS dedicated to body functions and displayed as neural maps of the body (interoceptive maps). Changes in the external environment are perceived via the exteroceptive senses (smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight) and displayed in dedicated sensory regions as neural maps of the external world (exteroceptive maps).

Changes displayed in neural maps may trigger ‘action programs’ — sets of innate, programmed physiological actions aimed at addressing the detected changes and thereby maintaining or restoring homeostatic balance. The actions include changes in viscera and internal milieu (for example, alterations in heart rate, breathing and hormonal secretion), striated muscle (for example, facial expressions and running) and cognition (for example, focusing attention and favouring certain ideas and modes of thinking). There are two main types of action programs: ‘drives’ and ‘emotions’ (of note, some authors refer to all action programs as emotions.

Drives are aimed at satisfying basic instinctual needs and include hunger, thirst, libido, exploration and play, care of progeny and attachment to mates. In the case of thirst, the interoceptive detection and neural mapping of high blood osmolarity triggers a set of physiological actions that result in dryness of the mouth and an increase in urine concentration (see the table). Emotions include disgust, fear, anger, sadness, joy, shame, contempt, pride, compassion and admiration, and they are mostly triggered by the perception or recall of exteroceptive stimuli (although there are exceptions: for example, fear caused by interoceptive stimuli such as cardiac pain or air hunger). In the case of fear, the exteroceptive detection and mapping of an external threat (for example, a large animal) triggers physiological actions that include increased heart rate, secretion of adrenaline and the contraction of specific facial muscles, resulting in the facial expression of fear.

The changes in body state resulting from an action program are in turn sensed by the interoceptive system and mapped in the CNS. Body state changes mapped in interoceptive neural maps may remain non-conscious or may be experienced consciously as ‘feelings’.

Feelings are mental experiences that accompany a change in body state. External changes displayed in the exteroceptive maps of vision or hearing are perceived but largely not felt directly in the sense of feeling we adopt in this text. However, they may lead to feelings indirectly by triggering an action program that causes a change in body state and is subsequently felt.

Note that an action programme and the respective feeling are often referred to by the same name, although they are distinct phenomena. Thus ‘fear’ can refer to either an emotion (the set of programmed physiological actions triggered by a fear-inducing stimulus) or a feeling (the conscious experience of fear).

I was rather disturbed by the youtube where a rat brain was used as a neural network to control a simple robot. In the actual clip I think just a few cells were used but following the theme it gets worse and worse. Once you decide something (in this case rats) has no value you're on a slippery slope - where are you going to draw the line? Does (for example) Syne have any value? I don't think it is my responsibility to choose whether or not Syne has a value.

If were you experimenting on Syne, or he was in one of your mazes then it would be your responsibility to make sure he was safe, and that his wittle feelings didn't get hurt, but if he's safe, fed a proper diet, and free to leave at anytime...no harm-no foul.  Remember the one that you freed and it came running back?  

With age I seem to have (almost) completely lost the interest and ability to 'look in'. There's so much fantastic stuff 'out there'. I have a pair of seagulls nesting about 10 feet from where I am now. I'm lucky but with a slice of bread you can be anywhere and get some of the best friends you're ever likely to make. There's birds on roofs and in bushes. There's probably rats most places too but I'm not going to suggest making friends with them - even though I rather like their company (my wife must never find this out though). There's beauty everywhere. The sunrise is free but you have to be up early to see it.

Well, you could have fooled me.  You've spent a great deal of time trying to get an intuitive understanding of relativity.  BTW, how are you with hyperbolic geometry?  That may help.

I live in the country but I don't have any rats because there's a wise ole owl living in my oak tree.  This year she had babies.  They're so cute.  I want to take a picture but I'd have to climb up on a ladder to get a good shot.  She'd probably attack me.  

The sunsets are amazing here.

[confused2]

Remember the one [rat] that you freed and it came running back?

I don't think Ratty was sufficiently motivated to swap a diet of fruit cake and chocolate for a diet of nuts and berries. There were many other factors (and many other rats).

If you are in the business of inserting electrodes into brains to force (say) rats to turn left whether they want to or not ... well I think there's only one brain you can morally try that out on and that is your own. Trying to force Ratty to become a country rat instead of a house rat is superficially similar but morally there is a world of difference. Please don't ask me to try to explain what that actual difference is.

You've spent a great deal of time trying to get an intuitive understanding of relativity.

Intuitive indeed - so, like with eyeballs, I can see what is out there more clearly.

The OP is about feelings - emotions - a sort of internal weather. My claim (which I stand by) is that I have less internal weather than when younger and I pay less attention to the internal weather that remains.

Sunrise has a carpe diem quality that Sunset conspicuously lacks. If you can watch the Sun rise then the rest of the day is your oyster. I generally find it is a rather hung over little oyster but I don't think that entirely detracts from the sentiment.

New dawn for Confused2 - Minkowski space.