Keith Sutherland

Consciousness and Emotion

JCS reviews a new consciousness studies journal1

It somehow seemed appropriate to be reviewing the journal Consciousness and

Emotion during the same week the Kubrick-Spielberg film AI was released in the

UK. The film describes the attempt to instill emotional consciousness in robots

and examines the resulting ethical problems — Mommy could not bring herself to

take her cyborg ‘son’ David back to the factory to be dismantled after her biologi-

cal child awoke from his cryogenic coma. Unfortunately Spielberg’s addiction to

schmaltz meant that the film failed to live up to the promise of 2001, so serious

students of these issues will have to plough through this new journal.

For the first half of the twentieth century, psychology was content to view its

human subject matter as little more than a stimulus-response machine, on account

of the dominance of behaviourism. The sterility (and downright silliness) of this

project led to the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’, but this did little more than to

replace the S-R machine with the Turing machine. Even though cognition was

once more back on the agenda it was assumed that it could be modelled by sym-

bolic logic and represented in any (computational) medium.

It was only in the wake of the failure of the classical AI programme that cogni-

tive science returned to naturalism — the study of cognition as implemented in

the species homo sapiens, rather than some hypostatised abstraction. The focus of

attention shifted from mathematical logic to neuroscience and evolutionary biol-

ogy. Rather than pursuing the (quixotic) search for ideal rationality, scientists

started enquiring how human agents actually took decisions and were surprised to

find that emotion was an indispensable part of the process. As recorded in his

influential book Descartes Error (1994), the neurologist Antonio Damasio dis-

covered that patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex — the part of the

brain that deals with the social emotions — were unable to make the simplest of

decisions and generally acted in a decidedly irrational way.

Throughout the wilderness period of twentieth-century psychology, the study

of the role of affect in cognition was left in the hands of the disciples of Sigmund

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 12, 2001, pp. 79–82

[1] Consciousness and Emotion, edited by Ralph D. Ellis and Natika Newton, John BenjaminsPublishing Company, 2 Issues per annum, NLG 250 (institutions), NLG 110 (individuals). Anabridged version of this review was published in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Freud. But this was a decidedly mixed blessing as psychologists had little or no

success in confirming Freud’s theories experimentally. As a result Freudian psy-

chology is now viewed as an amusing fiction — of interest only to students of the

humanities — and the study of emotion has been relegated to the impoverished

(in terms of research funding) side of C.P. Snow’s cultural iron curtain.

Of late there have been a few attempts to storm the barricades. After the fall of

the Berlin Wall, Marx scholar Jon Elster shifted his attention to the study of emo-

tion in his book Alchemies of the Mind (1999), drawing equally on literature —

from Shakespeare to Stendhal to Jane Austen — and scientific psychology. Ber-

nard Baars agrees in his article in the first issue of Consciousness and Emotion

that science has thrown out the baby with the bathwater as ‘the very heart of

human existence has been untouchable for decades’ (C&E, 1, p. 12). Baars’s ‘four

scientif ic taboos’ — consciousness, emotion, the humanities and

psychodynamics — are all up for liberation by this new journal.

Freud famously theorised that most human affect is below the threshold of con-

sciousness, but Ellis and Newton do to Freud what Marx did to Hegel. According

to the editors emotion plays a crucial role in distinguishing between conscious

and unconscious information processing. ‘If we ask ourselves why this instance

of information processing is conscious . . . it is because it arises out of an organ-

ism’s motivating emotional life’ (C&E, 1, p. 1). And ‘all forms of consciousness .

. . must be motivated by emotional processes’ (C&E, 1, p. 8). If this is the case

then David in AI would have been conscious, whereas HAL in 2001 would not.

If consciousness is grounded in emotion (rather than higher-level processes

like language) then this has implications for the study of animal consciousness.

Much of the work in affective neuroscience is based on animal studies, making it

far harder to agree with Descartes that animals are unconscious biological

machines, who ‘don’t have feeling states, just affective behaviors’ (Watt, C&E, 1,

p. 106). One can anticipate a substantial input from ethologists to future issues of

this journal and, given the ‘precautionary principle’ in bioethics, this work will

have implications for the humane treatment of animals (and, according to schol-

ars like Baars and Thomas Metzinger, emotionally-intelligent robots). As affec-

tive neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp puts it, ‘silence on such matters is a potentially

immoral stance’ (C&E, 1, p. 19).

The other area of ethics that the journal seeks to explore is the field of criminol-

ogy. In his short article ‘My amygdala-orbitofronal-circuit made me do it’ (C&E,

1, pp. 167–75), psychologist Bill Faw explores some of the possible conse-

quences of the neuropsychological study of cortical lesions and developmental

sociopathy for issues of criminal liability. Unfortunately the article is far too

lightweight to cover this area properly.

Notwithstanding the thoroughgoing naturalism of the contributors to Con-

sciousness and Emotion, there is a residual hostility to the evolutionary psychol-

ogy of Tooby, Cosmides and their followers. Panksepp’s general polemic on the

topic (2001) has given rise to extensive debate, but the specific target of his article

in this journal is the information-encapsulated ‘modules’ derived from ‘armchair

Pleistocene-oriented logical analysis of human mind and behavior’(C&E, 1,

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p. 21). The editors of Consciousness and Emotion prefer to view ‘consciousness’

and ‘emotion’ as integrated features of self-organizing systems rather than as

independent modules. The cogs and wheels on the jacket illustration of Steven

Pinker’s How the Mind Works, along with the author’s mysterian inclinations

over the ‘hard problem’, show the extent to which evolutionary psychology is still

entrapped in the Cartesian worldview, roundly rejected by this new journal.

The article by psychiatrist Louise Sundarajan on the role of background mood

in creativity (C&E, 1, p. 227–43) is both fascinating and insightful, though the

link to artistic creativity is a little tenuous. The article is a study of the application

of Eugene Gendler’s holistic psychotherapy system which aims to ground emo-

tions in ‘bodily felt sense’. I was surprised, then, that the author failed to draw

parallels with William James’s study of ‘fringe’ consciousness or to comment on

the similarities between Damasio’s understanding of background emotions and

the James-Lang theory of emotion (which clearly informs it).

Timo Jarvilehto’s two-part article ‘Feeling as knowing’ (C&E, 1, p. 245–7; 2,

pp. 75–102) is a good description of the attempt to move beyond the sterility of

the cognitivist paradigm which is still dominant in AI and psychology. Jarvilehto

describes emotion as a ‘reorganization of the organism–environment system’ and

the inner ‘phenomenal’ quality of an emotion cannot be separated from its inten-

tional object. It is only with hindsight that we can abstract the emotion ‘fear’ from

the bear that caused it. Emotions are acquired in a social context and are only

(falsely) seen as private with the onset of language and ‘personal consciousness’.

Of course the clear implication is that when the anthill is disturbed, the behaviour

of the ants has to be described as emotion, though humans cannot say whether the

ants experience ‘fear’ or ‘anger’.

Cognitivists and other consciousness mysterians will pounce on Jarvilehto’s

claim (derived from a 2001 BBS target article by O’Regan and Noë) that ‘there is

no phenomenal quality of conscious experience that would exist independently

from, or in addition to the things we do.’ Aha, cries Chalmers, these guys are just

begging the question or, worse still, they’re behaviourists. This raises an interest-

ing question — is the new wave of anti-cognitivism anything more than a

psychological Counter-Reformation? Kevin O’Regan and Dan Dennett have

freely admitted that they don’t consider the label ‘behaviourist’ an insult.

Jarvilehto considers this charge in his article and concludes that he differs from

the early Watson by extending the concept of behavior to the organism–

environment system. To which one might reply that this is just a repackaging of

G.H. Mead and other social behaviourists. But then Jarvilehto attempts to further

distance himself from the 1930s by introducing the concept of ‘intention’ or

expectation of the result. But even this was foreseen by Watson’s ‘fractionally

antedating goal responses’ (Rosch, 1994). Only time will tell if the New Turks of

consciousness studies aren’t just White Russians with sharp haircuts.

Few of the articles in Consciousness and Emotion fail to cite Damasio’s last

two books (1994; 1999), which is either a sign of the magisterial status of their

author, or the fledgling state of the discipline. (Damasio’s critics — including

Elster (1999) and neuropsychologist James Blair (2001) — fail to get a look in.)

REVIEW OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND EMOTION 81

Indeed it remains an open question as to whether the field of consciousness stud-

ies is big enough to support sub-specialities. Thomas Natsoulas’s article on ‘feel-

ings’ as intrinsic to states of consciousness (C&E, 1, p. 139–66) at first glance

appears to be about emotion. But it isn’t really — Natsoulas limits himself to the

development of William James’s argument that conscious states have both cogni-

tive (‘knowing’) and qualitative, experiential elements (‘qualia’). This article

would have been perfectly at home in any philosophy of mind journal. Similarly

Carl Anderson’s article ‘from molecules to mindfulness’ (C&E, 1, p. 193–226)

offers an interesting fractal analysis of traffic clusters on motorways and informa-

tion superhighways but is only marginally related to emotional consciousness.

The editors need to ensure that they establish a sharper focus to their new forum

and favour papers from affective neuroscience, ethology and literary studies.

The journal also suffers from their publisher’s trademark minimalist approach

to routine editorial tasks. Faw’s reference to ‘gut decisions, as in the Prisoner’s

Game’ (C&E, 1, p. 174) might well be a mistaken reference to Damasio and

Anderson’s gambling experiments. The journal is also littered with errant para-

graph indents, typos (e.g. ‘Liebet’ rather than ‘Libet’) and missing references.

John Benjamins is not the only publisher to replace the copy editor with the

author’s spellcheck program — but this then gives rise to howlers like Anderson’s

claim that traffic jams occur when a driver ‘breaks’ too soon.2 Given the steady

growth of open-access web archives, publishers need to ensure that they add some

serious value to the manuscripts they are reproducing.

But this is more by way of irritation (or schadenfreude). The editors of Con-

sciousness and Emotion are to be congratulated for launching on the crest of the

wave of interest in embodied, enactive and other visceral approaches to cognition

(see, for example, Núñez and Freeman, 1999; Thompson and Varela, 2001). It’s

too soon to see whether, as Damasio claims in his 1999 book, cognitive science is

undergoing (yet another) paradigm shift, but hopefully we will hear less discus-

sion of neuroprosthetics, zombies, epiphenomenalism and brains in vats.

References

Blair, R.J.R. and Cipolotti, L. (2000), ‘Impaired social response reversal: a case of “acquiredsociopathy” ’, Brain, 123, pp.1122-41.

Damasio, A. (1994), Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam).Damasio, A. (1999), The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co.)Elster, J. (1999), Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: CUP).Núñez, R. and Freeman, W.J. (1999), Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention and

Emotion (Exeter: Imprint Academic).O'Regan, J.K. and Noë, A. (2001), ‘A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness’,

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24 (5).Panksepp, J. and Panksepp, J.B. (2001). ‘A continuing critique of evolutionary psychology: Seven

sins for seven sinners, plus or minus two’, Evolution and Cognition, 7, pp. 56–80.Rosch, E. (1994), ‘Is causality circular? Event structure in folk psychology, cognitive science and

buddhist logic’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1, No. 1, 1994, p. 59.Thompson, E. and Varela F.J. (2001), Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and consciousness’,

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5 (10), pp. 418–25.

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[2] Admittedly this is an improvement on a recent claim in The Daily Telegraph that record city traderbonuses will lead to a run on penthouse apartments and porches (sic).