Curious emotions : roots of consciousness and personality in motivated action / Ralph D. Ellis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ellis, Ralph D.

Series:

Advances in consciousness research ; v. 61.

Advances in consciousness research, 1381-589X ; v. 61

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Consciousness.

Emotions.

Motivation (Psychology).

Self-organizing systems.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia, PA : J. Benjamins Pub., 2005.

Summary:

Emotion 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:

Curious Emotions

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Table of contents

Introduction

1. The enactive approach to affective intentionality

2. Some preliminary predictions of enactivism

3. The "curious" emotions

4. Conceptualizing action versus reaction

5. Plan of the book

1. Preconscious emotional intentionality

1. Motivation, conscious emotion, and unconscious emotion

2. The murkiness of emotional intentionality

3. Aims, objects, triggers, and symbolization-vehicles

4. The roles of sensation, interoception, and sensorimotor action imagery

2. Motivated attention in action

1. Linear versus dynamical causal sequences in the brain

2. Conflicting theories with conflicting empirical predictions

3. The P300 ERP as an operational definition of perceptual consciousness

4. How the Mack and Rock data relate to the two types of hypotheses

5. The paradox of early and late selection

6. Attention and conscious processing

7. Further implications for the problems of attention and consciousness

3. Non-consummatory motivations

1. Intertheoretic reduction and consummatory-drive reductionism

2. The notion of "extropy": A non-reductive force?

3. The humanistic notion of "life wish"

4. A possible synthesis

4. Homeostasis, extropy, and boundary needs as grounding specific emotions

1. Physiological evidence for non-consummatory motivation

2. Novelty, constraints to freedom, and the action-consciousness connection

3. The importance of extropy needs in higher mammals

4. Existential requirements for an adequate dynamical theory of emotion

5. Toward an integrated physiological and phenomenological account

5. Varieties of extended self and personality

1. How emotion grounds the various senses of self

2. Why not an illusory-choice model?.

3. The embodied self and the personality

4. How can there be knowledge of the self?

6. Learning about emotions through the arts

1. An enactive dance form for the eye

2. Why does art move, and not just entertain?

3. Love and other non-consummatory motivations

7. Dynamical systems and emotional agency

1. The causal power of dynamical systems

2. How can top-down systems avoid violating causal closure?

3. The emotional brain as an enactive system

4. Objections and responses

Conclusion

References

Index

The series Advances in Consciousness Research.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612156830

9781282156838

1282156837

9789027294555

9027294550

OCLC:

70774144