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Proper Embodiment: The Role of the Body in Affect and Cognition Mog Stapleton PhD in Philosophy The University of Edinburgh 2011 Declaration of authorship I, Mog Stapleton, declare that this thesis is composed by me and that all the work herein is my own, unless explicitly attributed to others. This work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Mog Stapleton, 31st August 2011 Parts of this thesis have been published, or are forthcoming (with the support of my supervisor) in the following articles: Invited chapter on Emotion (translated by Marraffa) for Marraffa, M. & Paternoster, A. (Eds) (2011) Scienze cognitive. Un'introduzione filosofica (Cognitive Sciences. A Philosophical Introduction), Carocci, Italy. “Feeling the Strain: Predicting the Third Dimension of Core Affect”. Invited commentary on Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, and Barrett. "The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review". (Forthcoming). Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In addition, sections of chapters 3 & 4 will appear in the following articles which have been accepted (subject to revisions): “Steps to a Properly Embodied Cognitive Science”. Review paper for Cognitive Systems Research. Accepted, May 2011 (subject to revision). “Es are good: Cognition as Enacted, Embodied, Embedded, Affective and Extended” (with Dave Ward). In Paglieri, F. & Castelfranchi, C. (Eds). (Forthcoming). Consciousness in interaction: The role of the natural and social environment in shaping consciousness. John Benjamins’ Advances in Consciousness Research. Accepted, July 2011 (subject to revision). ii Abstract Embodied cognitive science has argued that cognition is embodied principally in virtue of gross morphological and sensorimotor features. This thesis argues that cognition is also internally embodied in affective and fine-grained physiological features whose transformative roles remain mostly unnoticed in contemporary cognitive science. I call this ‘proper embodiment’. I approach this larger subject by examining various emotion theories in philosophy and psychology. These tend to emphasise one of the many gross components of emotional processes, such as ‘feeling’ or ‘judgement’ to the detriment of the others, often leading to an artificial emotion-cognition distinction even within emotion science itself. Attempts to reconcile this by putting the gross components back together, such as Jesse Prinz’s “embodied appraisal theory”, are, I argue, destined to failure because the vernacular concept of emotion which is used as the explanandum is not a natural kind and is not amenable to scientific explication. I examine Antonio Damasio’s proposal that emotion is involved in paradigmatic ‘cognitive’ processing such as rational decision making, and argue (1) that the research he discusses does not warrant the particular hypothesis he favours, and (2) that Damasio’s account, though in many ways a step in the right direction, nonetheless continues to endorse a framework which sees affect and cognition as separate (though now highly interacting) faculties. I further argue that the conflation of ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ may be the source of some confusion in emotion theory and that affect needs to be properly distinguished from ‘emotion’. I examine some dissociations in the pain literature which give us further empirical evidence that, as with the emotions, affect is a distinct component along with more cognitive elements of pain. I then argue that affect is distinctive in being grounded in homeostatic regulative activity in the body proper. With the distinction between affect, emotion, and cognition in hand, and the associated grounding of affect in bodily activity, I then survey evidence that bodily affect is also involved in perception and in paradigmatic cognitive processes such as attention and executive function. I argue that this relation is not ‘merely’ casual. Instead, affect (grounded in fine-grained details of internal bodily activity) is partially constitutive of cognition, participating in cognitive processing and contributing to perceptual and cognitive phenomenology. Finally I review some work in evolutionary robotics which reaches a similar conclusion, suggesting that the particular fine details of embodiment, such as molecular signalling between both neural and somatic cells matters to cognition. I conclude that cognition is ‘properly embodied’ in that it is partially constituted by the many fine-grained bodily processes involved in affect (as demonstrated in the thesis) and plausibly by a wide variety of other fine-grained bodily processes that likewise tend to escape the net of contemporary cognitive science. iii Table of contents Declaration of authorship ii Abstract iii Table of contents iv Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 I Emotion theories and the role of the body 5 Section 1: Theories of emotion 5 1.1 Feeling theories 6 1.2 Cognitivism 7 1.3 Appraisal theories 9 1.4 The concepts and categories of emotion 12 1.5 Summary of section 1 16 Section 2: Prinz’ embodied appraisal theory: the “grand reconciliation” 17 Section 3: Objections to Prinz’ embodied appraisal theory 23 3.1 Emotions and emotional experience 23 3.2 Emotions and constitution 26 3.3 Embodiment and appraisals: rejecting the “grand reconciliation” 31 3.4 Summary of chapter 32 II The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, criticisms, and alternatives 34 Section 1: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and criticisms 34 1.1 The ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’ 34 1.2 The ‘Iowa Gambling Task’ as empirical evidence for the ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’ 38 1.3 Two somatic marker hypotheses 41 1.4 Perseveration in the IGT 46 1.5 Summary of section 1 49 Section 2: Alternatives to the ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’ 50 2.1 Reversal learning: An alternative to the SMH 50 2.2 Behavioural strategies in decision-making 53 2.3 Contextual and episodic control in decision-making 55 2.4 VMPFC deficits and mental time-travel 59 iv 2.5 Summary of section 2 63 2.6 Summary of chapter 63 III Grounding affect in interoception 65 Introduction 65 Section 1: Pain as a case study to explore the distinction between affect and emotion 68 1.1 ‘Pain without painfulness’ and ‘painfulness without pain’ 68 1.2 Pain without a behavioural response 69 1.3 Feeling the object of pain without feeling pain 70 1.4 Feeling pain without an object of pain 70 1.5 Separating valence from the emotional-cognitive component 72 1.6 The role of valence in typical pain 74 1.7 Summary of section 1 77 Section 2: The neurobiology of affect 80 2.1 Interoception, pain and touch 80 2.2 Interoception grounds minimal consciousness 81 2.3 Cognition without a cortex 84 2.4 Interoception and ‘primordial emotions’ 87 2.5 Touch, temperature, and pain as ‘homeostatic emotions’ 88 Section 3: Grounding ‘core affect’ in interoception 94 3.1 Dimensions of the experience of affect 94 3.2 Core affect and the ‘circumplex’ 97 3.3 The dual face of affect: a mechanism for minimal appraisal 100 3.4 Summary of chapter 104 IV The role of affect in perception and cognition 105 Section 1: Interoception and perception 105 1.1 Top down information can influence early vision 105 1.2 Affective perception 107 1.3 Affect structures our perceptual phenomenology 113 1.4 Core affect as a basic psychological ingredient of mentality 116 Section 2: The role of affect in cognitive processing 122 2.1 ‘Affective’ structures do ‘cognitive’ work 122 2.2 Connectivity between ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ structures 124 2.3 Integration of affective processing at multiple stages 125 2.4 Lewis and Todd’s self-regulating brain 127 2.5 The amygdala and biological significance 129 2.6 Summary of chapter 130 v V Exploring the relation between affect and cognition 131 1 The causal-constitutive distinction 131 2 Explanatory separability and difference/contribution phenomena 135 3 Explanatory separability and orthogonality 139 4 Commensurability and orthogonality 141 5 GasNets and particular embodiment 143 6 Particular embodiment matters 147 7 Summary 151 Conclusion 153 1 The abundance of ‘gooey’ signalling 153 2 Back to the GasNets 154 3 Standard embodied cognitive science 157 4 What is the relation between emotion and cognition 159 5 Possible future directions of research 160 6 Last words 160 Bibliography 162 vi Acknowledgements This thesis and my intellectual development over the course of my PhD has emerged as a result of a coupling between myself and several people who have helped me shape ideas and entertain new ways of thinking and who have put me on new paths of discovery. My principal supervisor Andy Clark has been key to this throughout as well as giving me the opportunity to be part of the CONTACT project. I am deeply grateful to him for his guidance, encouragement, and support over the last few years. My secondary supervisor Julian Kiverstein has also been a critical and supporting figure giving me detailed feedback on several of the chapters, I am very grateful to him. Some of the work in this thesis has been presented at doctoral group workshops and I thank all those in the DoG group for their comments and suggestions and for providing such a fantastic forum in which to try out new work.