Consciousness Live! with Kate Pendoley (S4 E8)

0:05 all right we are live um joining me today a very special guest kate pandoli uh can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who may not know you yeah um so i am uh i'm currently at hunter college teaching hunter college in philosophy and i work on um questions about emotion um uh and i'm interested in the nature of emotions and also

0:39 questions about how emotions interact with other kinds of mental states um and what that can tell us about what emotions are um so i'm interested in questions about um consciousness uh emotional feelings what those are um as well as questions about like the role of emotion in our lives um and related questions about like what we can learn from emotions um and uh things like that interesting so i mean a little bit before we go into the

1:13 specifics of some of the things you've worked on i am curious a little bit about maybe how you arrived at this interest because i know i know you have like a background in um or maybe i don't know it actually but uh i thought i did know that you had a background and maybe some kind of english uh maybe it's an undergrad or something like that that's true yes so i was um very lucky to be part of um a poetry writing concentration at the university of virginia with some really amazing um teachers um

1:48 and so i originally uh was really interested in investigating like the nature of how we understand figurative language and um that kind of thing and and that led me into um questions about i mean i realized that those questions were like really philosophy of mind questions right um and um and that led me into thinking about emotional feelings which are a big part of uh

2:22 at least many kinds of um figurative language stuff um right so like we think of them as being very evocative um and things like that and so yeah so i became interested in um what feelings are how we can understand them um kind of through that route um i haven't really circled back to that question um but that's kind of like the that's what led you there anyway yeah yeah i was interested in investigating yeah i mean in undergrad i was studying

2:56 these things very much in parallel because i was also a philosophy major um interesting yeah yeah i guess what i was wondering too is whether you thought sort of given where you are now in your research and sort of where you started or whatever do you think that that way of addressing those kind of questions is helpful to understanding the emotions oh like like from literature and things like yeah for poetry or literature just generally evocative language yeah maybe i mean i'm sort of gearing up to turn back to

3:29 this hopefully in the next i don't know a couple of years this was absolutely not part of my uh grad work right no i don't started spreading this on you sorry yeah no it's okay i mean like this is something that i guess i mean we usually there's a lot of talk about um uh what we can learn from about emotions from literature or like you know whether we have real emotions in response to literature those are questions that are familiar um in various parts of um the philosophy of emotion literature

4:02 and you know the question about whether thinking about evocative sort of like figurative or evocative language can get us important stuff about emotions like i don't think i have a satisfying answer to that question right now my sort of hunch is that yes um uh because i've sort of been interested in the idea in the past that um like understanding the feeling of emotion

4:33 um or like what's involved in an emotional feeling could help us to understand why figurative language or various um kinds of artistic expression are so evocative um kind of like across the board um yeah and i was at one point attracted to the idea that uh there are similarities important similarities between um emotional feelings and like visual uh imagery or things like this um but that was kind of like my early

5:08 hunch when i was just starting out and um those are after ten year uh thoughts to return to yeah yeah yeah okay interesting so i wanna i mean so i know well maybe is it is it standard in the literature on emotions to talk in terms of emotional feelings in the way that you do i don't know yeah sorry go ahead no you fit your head yeah tend to think so um i mean i think that like the way i think that the kind of question that

5:43 i'm interested in when it comes to emotional feelings i mean like i'm i'm interested in um what they are and how we should explain them and maybe that's i don't want to say that's not what other folks are interested in in looking at emotional feelings um but i think that i have some cat contributions yeah i see some cats yeah maybe i'll let him out so i can uh um yeah go ahead no worries yeah yeah

6:17 let me just get my assistant the joys of live broadcasting yeah exactly um [Music] um so i mean i yeah so i think that i'm approaching emotional feelings a bit differently um from other folks in in the literature partially because i want to

6:48 investigate the idea of emotional feelings sort of um by putting them more closely by sort of like putting the considerations about emotional feelings more closely in contact with questions um from other areas of life consciousness research so i think that that connection is like more at least a little more present for me than it is for some other folks um writing about emotional feelings yeah i know i like that about your work

7:20 actually but so but more basically when you say an emotional feeling do you mean by that like just a conscious experience of an emotion or because i know you want to defend like the role for unconscious emotions yes but not unconscious emotional feelings is that the way you're using these terms or oh maybe i so so like i am i think that we should be so part of the reason that people want to reject unconscious emotions sometimes is because they don't want to accept um they don't allow unconscious

7:52 emotional feelings that seems like a problem um and i think that um i'm kind of on board with lots of other views um in other domains in philosophy of mind um that are happy to allow unconscious perceptual um qualitative character for instance um and so i don't see unconscious emotional feelings as being a big problem um but so i think it would be attractive i'm perfectly open to um an account of

8:27 emotions that allows that there are unconscious emotional feelings um i don't think that we ought to say that they're exclusively conscious um yeah yeah so the emotional feelings part so the the way you're thinking of it then is like the emotional feeling is like a bit like the uh phenomenal character of a sensory experience or something it's the well that was the way that i had begun i i i think that it's really intuitive to fix that um and so i think that we shouldn't sort of discount that possibility at the

9:01 get-go um but uh the more closely i looked into the question of whether that parallel really holds um the more worried i became about becoming because like uh because we i mean like it's just harder to argue for that it's hard to argue for unconscious emotions period and the way that i go about doing that is by pointing to um you know our attributions of unconscious emotions um

9:34 to one another and the success of those attributions um in our explaining behavior or predicting behavior um but uh we don't have we can't do the kind of thing that we can do for perception where we sort of like at least not in the same very reliable way where we show you a stimulus right and then uh you respond right there are emotional stimuli but they're not uh so uniform across individuals the way that yeah and they're also pathetic and weak i mean

10:08 you can't like really frighten someone or you know put them in terror of their life ethically so they have to be sort of weak weakened down in that sense but uh so but but you so this kind of goes with the quality space you can't do one for emotions that you that you were arguing for your one of your papers but this is a different i guess a different way of using that same point here um yeah this is a different um consideration against so that's sort of like a background consideration is like okay so practically speaking this

10:41 is gonna be tough um because uh there's sort of this practical obstacle which is that it's very difficult um to uh present someone with the stimuli um that would induce an emotional response in the same way that we can for something like like a colors a color qualitative character yeah do you think so one thing that i was wondering about this is sort of maybe a two left field for what we're talking about but one thing i was wondering about is like what if you could do kind of a neuro phenomenology you imagine some distant

11:15 future case where they are able to you know stimulate the brain in various ways and map out the sort of resulting experiences or whatnot um then could you do it could you build the spaces of emotions up that way um do you think i think it's possible um and um so i got some i got a really great question about uh this um in it in a talk i gave a couple of weeks ago um so like and and sort of to explain the idea i'd

11:48 have to back up a bit um but i think that so what i say is that um the feeling of emotion isn't going to clue us into the emotion we're having in quite the same sort of like fine-tuned way that um or at least it doesn't allow the very fine-tuned discriminations that um the on some views the qualitative character of um color um allows us to perform right and so

12:22 um and so that's uh depending on what you think about the relationship between the episodic and metaphysical you might think that um there are these uh sorry that the emotional feelings do are sort of like fine-grained um in a way that if we were able to um do this kind of the kind of thing that you're suggesting we would find that actually there are these fine grained responses that are quite

12:54 different right um but uh right so we may not be able to sort of describe the differences um that's part of what i say is like one reason against thinking that um the emotional feelings play this kind of role for emotions that on some views qualitative character plays for perception um is that we can't uh like describe the differences the way that um sorry i say that we can't describe

13:27 the differences uh we sort of like fall short in characterizing um the nature of the qualitative character of an emotional feeling if you think there is one we fall short of sort of saying what the differences are even though we they seem to be very vivid to us um and the same is arguably true right in making fine-grained perceptual discriminations maybe you can't do that unless uh the colors are right next to one another for instance but when they are you can do that kind of um discrimination so it might be that if we could

14:00 um sort of induce uh these emotional states uh you could get a really fine-grained sort of like thing that picks out um uh emotional feelings that seem otherwise that we like don't have the resources to describe as being different um but i'm not sure that that would then get us sort of like the awareness of the emotional feeling

14:33 in the way that um it does for the um sensory states that awareness is the awareness of it what do you mean by that um [Music] so the way that we normally become aware of uh like that we're having a awareness of a particular qualitative character or sorry that we're having awareness of like a blue thing is um at least partly in virtue of becoming aware that there is like this blue character right um

15:06 and so not only does uh the blue character play this discriminatory role um in allowing us to discriminate slightly different blues from one another but um also this is uh explains part of our awareness of what sort of um what our mental state is um and i think that this is may not be true for emotional feelings yeah which part um sorry that we right so in emotions we um

15:40 have a feeling but uh usually um but even when we're aware sorry in emotions we're normally aware of having a feeling of some kind but we're not always aware of which emotion we're having on the basis of the feeling and this is another reason for thinking that emotional feelings um may be quite different from um qualitative character sensory states so this is so the idea here is that you have a kind of a state that

16:12 you can recognize as emotional but you can't say like or or is it even that you can't even tell if it's an emotion um or is it just sort of some unsettled emotional state and then so you sort of recognize that it's there but you can't classify it any further and so i guess the idea the argument here is that well even in cases of not like sensory experiences that represent things that are vague the parts are still kind of not vague but here there's something that's literally vague about the experience itself not just like the parts representing something vague but in a

16:45 distinct way that's the way it seems to me yeah um and that seems to be importantly just analogous um from a sensory case but um so could one respond i mean i'm not sure i have this view of the emotions in fact you know whatever but i'm just curious about the sort of space of positions here but but could one say that maybe they're not so okay so what is this what is this like uh what does this show well maybe what it shows is that it's not they're

17:17 not exactly alike but maybe they're more perceptual like more qualitative character like than they are like these other things as opposed to that you know so maybe they're not exactly alike uh maybe in this one way there's a vagueness and content difference or something like that um but why would that show that it's not like qualitative at all yeah so i mean i think that um it might not show that they're not qualitative at all it certainly pushes against um the idea of like a very very a

17:51 perfect parallel um yeah and um i mean so like another question here is whether um i mean is is what the feelings are are um and so if we could do this kind of like thing where we're able to induce uh an emotion um and a really controlled way um that would help us in addressing these questions um but without that right like without that um when you look

18:25 at the kinds of responding that people have um when they're having an emotion and also the way that people tend to describe the feelings um even though that's an imperfect way of getting at what the feelings are right it tends to be in terms of bodily stuff and then in terms of intensity and balance um and um the bodily stuff doesn't track uh the emotions so we don't have a particular pattern of responding that um individuates the different emotion types um

18:58 unlike what we tend to think um or what what the so-called folk tend to do exactly but like for example your heart rate will get quicker in the case of anger and fear that's the sort of thing you're talking yeah that's the kind of thing exactly um but uh so that's not gonna do the trick and then um also you're not going to get uh right like whatever valence is um and i don't think it's yeah i don't think we have a totally

19:30 settled picture of what that is or whether it's like a unified kind uh right some people don't even think it's there from what i gathered yes and then intensity like whatever that's supposed to be like neither of those is going to zero in on an emotion type um and so like if these are all we have um it might be that we just don't have the resources for describing the emotional feeling um but you know combined together with because we our resources for describing color are they

20:04 fall short um right but at least we have reference to something out there um um but it means some perceptible property yes right exactly um but um but so it was so i'm maybe i'm not following what you're saying but uh is the idea here so in the emotional cases we don't have because i would have thought that you know one way of maybe i'm too brainwashed to but one way i've thought is that okay so you have the fear what is fear it's a

20:36 detection of something that's dangerous or harmful uh that's at least part of it and um sadness detection of loss anger detection of you know someone morally infringing on you or something but there's always something like that you can sort of say it's the thing you're picking up on in the world um which is part part maybe not part of the emotional content or something but at least part of like you know the character of the emotion the way you experience it yeah so i don't just have emotions willy-nilly they are

21:07 in response well sometimes when i do yeah so like sometimes there are misfires so be very uh sad about something that really isn't a big loss um that kind of thing where the emotion seems to be disproportionate um or even of the wrong kind but um i guess i think that it's quite different to talk about those evaluative features

21:40 like a loss um that it is to talk about perceptible properties um obviously right like obviously these are different um but uh it seems to me that there's greater variation across people in the way that they respond um that's part of the stimulus problem yes exactly um than the way i mean we know that like

22:12 people are color blind and so on and so forth and so have different experiences of um the world in terms of perception as well um but i think there's greater overlap um i mean this is why people like uh lisa feldman and uh even joel do they say these motions are not natural kinds um there's no unifying thing which connects all the different you know uh thing stimulating the environment which produce fear or whatever so

22:45 is that sort of the way that you're thinking and going on here i don't think we have to go that far i guess i don't know why we don't i mean some people do but many people don't say the same thing of belief right but belief is quite flexible um and it's not um as i put it closely tethered to the environment the way that um sensory states are um and i like that i like this in your work here like don't let belief off the hook is to hold it to the same standards over

23:18 here well well i mean like so i kind of like push in both directions so i say like look belief isn't all that rational that's one thing that i say yeah we think of belief as behaving very rationally and here i'm picking up on um eric middlebum's work um and also um joseph bendanya quite a bit um but like so belief isn't as rational as we make it out to be but at the same time people aren't like you know so happy i mean i don't think that we ought to say like i mean there are people who will say

23:49 this but i don't think that we ought to say that belief is not real um or like explanatory useful just because different people believe different stuff um or like have different beliefs in response to um the world uh so the fact that so i think that um for these constructionists for lisa film and barrett and for joe the move to saying that this and also i mean so like and before them um um griffiths is sort of the person right like i don't think that we need to go

24:24 from this observation that there's like a whole bunch of different uh responses emotionally that different people have to kind of roughly speaking the same situation that doesn't give us reason on its own to think that there's no natural kind there i think that's like way too big a job okay um yeah all right because we you know if it's useful if if we're actually getting something out of um you know attributing beliefs um if they are predictive and

24:57 explanatory um above behavior then that's a good reason to posit them and um so you want to chart like a middle ways or like a a modified way in between the two two camps that's right um i want to say that uh emotions are real drivers of behavior um even though we don't come fully sort of uh hardwired for emotion that's something that i think that um lisa feldman barrett and joe would do

25:30 are getting right um and at the same time we can think we can say that emotions are psychologically real um and that um they can occur um without our awareness um yeah and so in their realness uh do they have a qualitative component on your view are they just cognitive states or do not ultimately do not want to take because i sort of get the sense like you're

26:02 on the one hand you're saying look you know you could be a cognitive as a certain certain kind if you um you see these in parallels between belief and emotions and maybe modify standard constructive in a certain way yeah um and but you don't want to like really accept the the perceptual view um so yeah what ultimately on your way of doing things do these these states turn out to be i mean i like i'm attracted to the idea that they're their own type of mental state um and part of the reason that i'm sort of drawing these parallels

26:34 um is that i think that like first of all that's what lots of folks in the literature are doing so engaging with these questions in this way um and sort of like pointing out the shortcomings of both of these approaches is one way to do that um and also we have a much better unders i mean yeah the these are i think we have a better understanding of what's going on at least in perception um and so sort of talking about putting um the question of emotion in contact with um our understanding of perception um can help to show something about the

27:10 nature of emotion um i don't have a sort of like slogan about what emotions are i'd love to have one i don't have one now and i sort of see that as like a long term um a lot of goal yeah um project but but um i think that like aside from just intuition um i think it's hard to say that

27:44 there's something properly qualitative about emotions um and i don't want to just rely on intuition what's the work of the word properly what's the work of it um properly quality maybe nothing maybe i'm talk that's talking loosely there's nothing well i'll tell you a little bit about what i have in mind like obviously your emotional your bodily response is part of your emotional experience um and so that's going to be part of what you're

28:18 experiencing when you're having an emotion and um it seems totally right to say that there's qualitative stuff going on in your awareness of your bodily response or in the bodily response itself um and so i so like that's a reason for thinking that there is something qualitative going on with emotion but it's not an emotional like um so i should have started out by saying like there's not a it's hard to put your finger on um a pr um

28:56 a proprietary um quality for emotion and that's that's the kind of distinctive to only them yes um and i think that's a big part of the intuition that we have um i think it's also part of folk thinking like the intuitive folk picture not just the intuitive philosopher picture um just to be clear when you say it's part of the folk picture what you mean is that that there is a kind of distinctive feel for each emotion that's part of the folk picture yes yeah i know because i

29:29 would i used to i still think i can remember being one of the folk back in the days uh before i when before i went to college and i felt like yeah this was common sense i still feel like even after studying so much philosophy i still want it to be true the emotions are distinguished by but yeah i also rather feelings but but it's like you're very pessimistic about them you get a lot of reasons why this just doesn't seem to really be cutting it i guess i'm like looking for reasons to take this seriously and i uh you know okay so i've said some

30:05 stuff about the bodily stuff okay that's compelling but i think it falls short um and um [Music] i also think that uh it might be that there's some kind of like imagery associated with our emotions um but i don't know that that's going to be so sort of you might imagine that your body is responding in a particular way even if it isn't um or you might have some kind of other associated imagery right like thinking that anger is red or something like that having that kind of thing

30:37 that's activated um but uh none of that seems to be proprietary um to emotion even though it's got some qualitative um character and so that seems to be so when you so when you um well how would i put this when when you on your accounts when one beca not you but when one uh yes when when we the royal we uh as a group of species become aware of the kind of emotional states that we're in

31:11 so introspectively um on your view what is it i'm having a bad job i'm doing a bad job expressing this question uh oh yeah what do we latch on to i guess is what i'm trying to ask an introspection that allows me to to know or that i'm you know angry at this moment as opposed to disgusted is there something or is there not something on your view that lasts me to do that uh i guess like let me ask a question about your question

31:44 um do you mean like is there an underlying state because i want to say that there is a state um that you are aware of is there something i'm introspectively accessing or is that that's accessible that's that's like clueing me into like what kind of state i'm in that yes i want to say yes to that okay um and um but it's not quite it's not qualitative whatever it is i'm accessing i don't think awareness of qualitative stuff is gonna get you

32:16 awareness it won't like sort of zero in on the emotion that you're having so i think that when you become aware um that you're angry um for instance it's not exclusively through awareness of qualitative features um yeah so you'll need other stuff like um i mean what i think i like i like uh joe's work on this and i like um your work with joe about this um the idea that there's some sort of um like uh representation of

32:49 um an emotion or sort of like a model that's activated of a particular emotion um and uh and uh or like a scheme in his terms i like that idea that there's a scheme um that's sort of going um and uh and so when you're aware of being in a particular emotional state um i like the idea that you're aware of like you know whatever is involved in that um and it makes sense to think that there's

33:23 a representation of anger um as well as uh perhaps um sort of a beginning of an unfolding of like anger behavior um so it has to so it sounds i mean it sounds complicated it sounds like i agree you have to be aware of like a bunch of stuff going on in the environment in in in you in terms of your behavior um but it's it's not like you have to it's not like you pick out oh there's the the anger

33:55 like you know when you when you introspect and you say how do you know you're saying blue as opposed to red or something it's not you don't tell a story like that what you say is well you know there's a certain way that blue appears and it's not the way red or blue appear differently and i can pick them out so you don't think it's like that with anger and disgust no i don't not even some more complicated version of that there's you have to bring in all sorts of uh i don't know that you need to rely on contextual cues i think that we do okay you don't have to go that far but you don't

34:28 have to be like okay what's going on in my environment i seem to be having an emotion what's going on in my environment that conclude me into which emotion it is sometimes that happens um but i don't think that it always does um instead you might sort of be aware that uh your um thinking in a way that's characteristic of how you tend to think when you're angry but i don't think it's going to be this like robust inference or anything like that like okay let me draw on um kind of my observation about what's

35:00 happening with me mentally speaking and then i'm gonna sort of like infer from all of that um what emotion i'm having it doesn't need to be sort of explicit in that kind of way i mean i just find that to me that's not what's introspectively like the way it seems i i do sort of feel like yeah there's like i can sense i can get the anger part and i know i've talked about david rosenthal and i know you have to probably about this but that he doesn't think that there's you know much that distinguishes the i think maybe he does think there is some kind of qualitative component to

35:33 the emotions i'm not sure do you i i don't know i we yeah we've talked about this for years and i uh i am not sure uh okay what his view about that is um uh i don't know i don't know exactly it doesn't fit so i mean so one of the reasons that i was attracted to this question is that um i yeah uh i'm not sure exactly what he

36:09 thinks um and whether he wants to say that there is a qualitative um component um to emotion but whatever he would say what you would say is maybe yes but it's not distinctively emotional there's something qualitative there but this is kind of like maybe i have a piece with joe's metaphor about the soup yeah it's like yeah you make the soup you put a bunch of stuff but none of them are soup ingredients it's like that celery and this is stock but it's not like celery is a soup ingredient like wheat you can use it to make soup it's one of

36:42 the things you put in there but it's not like it's not here because of that that's not why it showed up i think that yeah i think that um we might be really attracted to thinking that emotions have those essential components um because they because we experience them as being kind of automatic um or um because they seem to be sort of um yeah stuff that we don't have like a lot of control over um but i don't think that and so like

37:16 you know just like perception they seem to happen to us um and sort of come unbidden and i don't think that uh you know just i i mean once again um pushing back on that with the idea of uh sort of paradigmatically cognitive states they seem to happen to us as well um at least some of the time um so um yeah i think that the idea that there's sort of like a dedicated essence or like a hardwired thing um is partially due to um yeah the idea that emotions happen to us

37:51 in a way that might seem as if it's quite different from the way that cognitive states occur very interesting i mean i guess i was thinking about the other way because i also thought there was like a qualitative component of thought as well um but i guess i'm in the minority on that view so though no one cares about that but uh yeah i'd be interested to hear i mean i think that like if you if you are happy to go in that direction then you have more resources for accounting for the intuition that the emotions have distinctive phenomenal characters yeah good because that's the way i would

38:25 be i mean for me it seems like if you're if it's accessible by introspection then you gotta it's gotta be because there's something consciousnessy involved because it would be weird for us to be like systematically wrong about this yeah that's part of it but also that's just how we know about things by introspection unless you have like some like displaced perception viewer there's other views about pers uh about introspection but yeah it's like um that's what what it how we know about what's going on in there or so it would

38:58 see that's what i would that's what i would want to say um and i you know this is i guess so one of the questions i i have for you um is you know if you have a view like you take someone like joe's view um and i you know we know joe and i don't agree on 100 everything but we've got a lot but uh um so you take a view like his and he's going to say there's no unconscious emotions yes there's all the schemas there's everything that you like but they're not unconscious emotions and you're going to say yeah but they are unconscious emotions though and he's going to say yeah but you know that's a verbal issue maybe and you know

39:31 it's dangerous to talk that way so do i wonder do you think a my question is in seven parts yeah i wonder if you think uh on on the one hand that he's right that is a verbal issue and two if you think that he if he is you know it is still better to talk in that way and you know so anyway yeah i wonder what you think about that yeah um so i'm always worried that there's something important that i'm missing

40:03 about this um but about this point that it's just horrible um but i don't think it is just verbal because um and i think i've we've sort of talked about this a bit before um because what um if it were if if we should if sort of like what i want to say are unconscious emotions joe is happy to say you know maybe something like that exists but it's not an unconscious emotion um i think that this has implications

40:36 for like how we contend with the emotions um impractical when it comes to like practical concerns like coping um because if you can have an unconscious emotion um then uh and and maybe some of the ways that we um cope with or modify or whatever our unconscious emotions are a little different um than what we do for emotions that we're aware of um right but if they're sort of

41:09 like within the same family of things um then perhaps we ought to be thinking about targeting the unconscious emotions with whatever this therapeutic stuff is um that we think is appropriate to them and i think that um it's i mean my reading of joe on this point is that um he's sort of saying like we ought to be targeting um the conscious emotions largely because that's like what is the distressing stuff

41:42 um and like we care about feelings we want to feel better um and so we should be sort of like targeting that stuff um with uh our therapeutic approach but um it seems to me that i mean if we're right in attributing unconscious emotions if emotions sort of drive behavior even when we're not aware of them um and perhaps also drive sort of like unconscious thinking um or patterns of responding then we ought to be targeting

42:14 uh those as well um not just our awareness of um how we feel um and um you know that should have downstream effects i my understanding of joe's view is that um he doesn't think we should be targeting that unconscious stuff um yeah and i don't know if that's that's the right way of to think about what he thinks because maybe you get that impression because he's on you know the war path about that the other side being neglected so he's

42:46 over emphasizing that we should take into consideration the subjective the feeling component um but i i think that's he thinks that the two systems are so tightly biologically integrated that if you don't address both levels then you're going to get influences from one to the other so the feeling part can influence the behavior part uh even though they're distinct you know the feelingy powerful on his view is in the prefrontal cortex and

43:19 um the behavior parts in the amygdala let's say just for simplistic you know over some fear so for fear exactly so you'll get some influences from the top part influencing that stuff down there so if you're just messing with the the amygdala then the higher order systems can affect it it's going to go back and if you just mess with the higher order systems then the the lower systems can affect that and so i do think that he thinks you need to to deal with both um i i think i mean who knows he says different things at different times but

43:53 my reading of him is that uh the the danger here is that when you use the term unconscious emotion um people interpret that in a kind of first order way if we want to use that language really quickly whereby what we can say mean by that is they mean oh here is an emotion which you are feeling but just don't know your feeling so and and his and even though that's not what's meant by an unconscious emotion an unconscious emotion would be an emotion that you don't feel

44:26 uh or if it's an emotional feeling in your terms of someone that you're not like experiencing at the moment there's no emotional experience um but his his idea is that whenever you use the word like fear or anger or disgust people can't help it it's like automatic they think oh the feeling um so it's a pragmatic concern yeah um and and then so you get people saying things like oh we're studying fear and bias is this whole debate like for example it with the amygdala and then so you know it doesn't it doesn't even allow you to

44:58 ask the question about well is the peripheral cortex importantly involved in the in the feeling part or not and is that important um i guess yeah so i have a few questions about this like one of which is um maybe maybe it's not fair uh but like how much does this rely on fear as a model um and like how does it um sort of um uh how can it work for other emotions where we have not

45:32 identified a low road and a high road analog yeah um and i'm i don't know that joe is committed to this i'm concerned that other folks who take this kind of approach um i think um scarantino kind of falls into this camp although his view is a bit different yeah um um but like if we don't have i mean and this is like familiar from lisa feldman barrett and all of those kinds of people but like if we don't have

46:05 evidence for an a parallel or analog kind of flow road um then do we have to say that there's no unconscious motion and that these are exclusively cognitively assembled states as she would put it um right and so like we are not going to be in the position to say that there's ever like unconscious sadness or um uh unconscious anger if we aren't able to identify an analog of like the uh amygdala-centered kind of like path um for the unconscious um emotions when

46:41 it comes to the other emotions beyond fear i'm worried about that um for this kind of response um and i also uh i i mean i think that it's right to say like we've got to sort of approach things holistically when it comes to therapeutic approaches that seems right yeah um that's how to disagree with yeah so i'm on board with that kind of thrust of the of their reply um but uh also it seems like it might be highly fear specific

47:16 um and you know if it's just a verbal issue uh that's that's fine um but i think because i guess i don't see why we and i'm i guess i don't see why we um can't have uh sort of like unconscious thought like emotions um uh just sort of more thought like if you're talking about the high road um in jo's terms why not unconscious thought like

47:50 emotions like ones that don't have like a bodily component no ones that aren't like uh uh involving a structure like the amygdala well he thinks that you can so if you have that case of the i forget what her name is but you know the woman the bilateral bengali legions uh yes woman found no fear or whatever um so she uh famously people thought she didn't feel fear but then they did find out she felt fear it was under these very specific conditions i think they were suffocating or some some messed up thing

48:24 they were doing there basically and um she she reported being afraid and there's this video of her uh which i've seen where she basically is talking about and she was like you know i never noticed there's anything weird or unusual about my fear experiences like i just didn't it just felt like fear it was like you know she had noticed that it was unusual but that but joe's view is exactly that in that case right there there's no amygdala around and yet she does experience his fear um right but i was talking about an unconscious um an unconscious

49:01 uh fear that doesn't involve the amygdala i mean like obviously we're not going to be able to an unconscious one well that's not an example of an unconscious one yeah um but you would expect one that you would expect there to be an unconscious one since on his view that's not what the relevant lower order state is yeah yeah okay yeah um but so what so what you're saying then let me reinterpret what you're saying sorry about that you're saying that you would expect to find that we haven't seen a case like that where you have the lower of the the unconscious state that's in the cortex or something as opposed to in the

49:35 amygdala no i was saying why not think that you could have a more cortical response that's unconscious oh yeah he does think that yeah um but so then i guess like i don't really maybe it's i'm i must be being dense here so i apologize for that but i don't really see like what when what way you want to modify constructivism because you say in a couple of places that you you know uh it doesn't work um [Music]

50:08 but anyway yes so can you tell us like how how on your view do you think it needs to be modified yeah well i mean like if it's really all verbal then um then there is no real modification and i'm just oh okay oh okay on uh saying that we ought to allow for unconscious emotions um and um if constructionism is happy to allow that then uh that seems great and but so can let yeah so let me just push you on that a little bit do wha yeah why why is it so important to

50:45 have the unconscious emotions if you can do everything else without it if it really is just a verbal issue and and if you know people like joe think that you're doing more remember i i sort of secretly agree with you so i'm playing devil's advocate but like people like joe think you're doing more harm by talking this way um but when you say like an unconscious emotion you don't mean like an unconscious of something that you're feeling but just unaware of feeling like a an overflow type thing yeah i mean like you mean the other

51:17 thing but do you don't do you agree or maybe you don't do you agree that people are going to interpret you in that first way like the average scientist or you know even lay person um i guess like uh i guess i think if i'm very careful to say like i guess it seems to me to be very important to focus on like what we're up to and why we're asking these questions um and if i'm not just trying to um

51:52 account for like how we feel um right and like what people say about how we feel but instead for uh how we behave in the world um and how we tend to respond um if if uh i'm careful enough to be spelling that out as sort of like what i'm after um not that i don't care about how we feel like remember i told a complicated story at the beginning about like why i do care about how we feel better yeah totally in terms of in terms of getting a satisfying theory

52:25 um i think that this is what we ought to start with and then um we need to understand uh you know how why how we understand ourselves um but in terms of uh predicting how we tend to respond um like i don't know that if someone is listening carefully uh they're going to be confused about why i'm talking about unconscious emotions or in in that way i don't really i don't know that i see that that's a

52:58 reason to stop talking that way um yeah um you know that's fine no i've been i'm just curious what you thought about that because that really i think is is the main concern is that there's from joe anyway uh but like i said i'm i agree with you i think that it we can as long as we're very careful um i mean my expenses my sense of lucifer and barrett is that she is digging much more deeply um i mean for what it's worth i think that she's more

53:32 uh attached to the idea that there are no unconscious emotions because of feelings but maybe she would be willing to say that this is really a verbal issue as well um i don't know i'm yeah my impression is not but anyway yeah it would be interesting to talk to her and find out why she thinks that um i i know from having seen some of her interactions on twitter and read some of her stuff that yeah her main thing is that it's not a natural kind there's no unifying state um but that's that's a different question

54:04 about whether those things can occur in their varied ways unconscious i do think that they tend to go together the idea that like we could find a natural kind um and and all of this like that seems to me to be tied up with this idea that there is an unconscious emotion for lots of people i guess maybe not so much for joe but um i think that basically right like it's a question about like what evidence do we have deposit this state and if we could find um hardwiring that corresponded with each

54:39 emotion type um and if we could find that kind of responding uh in the absence of reportability or whatever um which like we can for some states um but i mean fear is great and um hawk one has right like this work on unconscious fear conditioning and right exposure therapy and stuff but um [Music] it seems to me that no i know there's a there's a line in the in all joe's work where he's like oh this could be extended to the other

55:12 emotions but here we'll just look at fear but you know what you're saying basically that's baby too too quick i guess i don't know why we should have to like i think that there's sort of a background theory about and this is why i sometimes have said that i think that this is kind of relying on a perceptual picture of the mind um even though this is not a perceptual uh no exactly right because the idea is like okay there's gonna be some kind of hardwired

55:44 uh uh natural kind that we could find um and um if instead an emotion is something that you um develop in this way that's quite sensitive to um expectations and norms about how we tend to respond um and things like that um then right why should we think that that is a picture of emotion which wouldn't allow for unconscious emotions i mean like

56:17 maybe yeah so like maybe joe is going to say like well we really just have to be careful about this because of how people are going to interpret what we're saying but in insofar as like what a mind does socially is help us to respond it makes perfect sense to think that some of that is going to happen like below the threshold of awareness um and if emotions are doing that then it makes perf like are in the service of helping us to respond socially then it makes perfect sense that some of that's gonna happen at least to me

56:50 below the threshold of awareness yeah i agree and i also like you know the kind of argument that you find from from rosenthal to from david uh where he where he's basically says we type these states in the same way when they're conscious and unconscious so it's a little bit weird to uh to reserve the type the term for for one and not the other given you know um anyway there's so same stimulating all that anyway so that's so that's i don't want to just get too distracted by that but uh so i agree with you about all that but i guess

57:21 um i guess that just yeah well i see we're running out of time here and i know that uh you have other things to do and i can't keep you for i i i have a little more time though okay and i said you have more than an hour yeah but uh because i guess one of the questions i had given was was whether you thought this was part of your project overall was kind of taking an approach to emotions that other people have taken um to the sensory mental qualities

57:57 which you know so on one side you find what you know david calls the consciousness first people you start from the first person access and you build out and then on the other side you find the third person people people like den and head up for nominology and rosenthal and so do you see yourself as like sort of you're starting on the second branch yeah and building as opposed and saying look just like some people are suspicious of first person access for sensory qualities as a basis for philosophy of mind so we should be the same sort of suspicious in the same way for emotions as well yeah i think that that

58:30 sounds even weirder for emotion than it does for sensory states um [Music] but i i don't think that it actually is like i think that they're kind of two different projects one is how we think about the emotions um that's valid and important um and it may have a lot to do with um like how uh how we interp why uh art is uh evocative um and like right so i think like i mean

59:06 circling back to this very amorphous thing that i talked about in the beginning um that's attractive to me like maybe the way that we think about the emotions um and imagine the emotions sort of um first personally um is responsible for a lot of our uh responses to art and things like that not perhaps not exclusively but perhaps insignificant part again this is not something i've written and that's not like any view that i have established but i'm what i'm saying is i think that that's

59:39 an important project um and i think that um you can maintain that and say that um we ought not to start with that when investigating the emotions um that that so you can kind of have both you can you can maintain that first person that stuff is important but also not foundational in the sense of where you begin theorizing that's right it's something that's perfectly worth explaining um but we need not assume that it provides like tons of insight into what's actually

1:00:12 happening in the state yeah do you so do you do you don't see this as a kind of illusionism about uh emotions why should that be an illusionism a form of evolutionism well i'm not yeah so the answer sounds like no uh i'm not saying that is but just because you know people like dead end people who start from that get accused of denying like you know the data sometimes by people like me um and other people i know who are gonna say look you're

1:00:43 leaving something out like the you know the what it's like bit or something like that so that's what you gotta start with that's what the theory is ultimately aiming to account for but you don't think that's ultimately what a theory of emotions aiming to account for um that's not what i'm trying to account for right now yeah um i don't know that it's like i mean so like where i stand now is that i'm open to the idea that these two what i've described as like these two sort of ways of investigating the emotions may be close um i have may sort of like be part of one project

1:01:17 um right now though i have doubts about whether the way that we think about our emotions um is really hooking on to um our emotion the underlying state in the way that we might be inclined to think that it does um because of the dis analogies um with sensory states for one thing um yeah so like for instance when someone like me says well by introspection i sort of seem to see there's a qualitative thing there with

1:01:50 the distinguishes anger from disgust you're saying that that might be a that sort of that's a mistake i'm saying it might be a mistake yeah um and the reasons for it like i mean i think it's an important question and one that i don't have an answer to why that seems to be qualitative i mean like this is the question that like motivated all my getting into this um to begin with um and i don't feel that i have a complete answer like if we if it turns out that we want to think yeah

1:02:24 if it turns out that we ought to think that this really isn't qualitative why does it seem qualitative right and and like is this the only kind of case where it does where there is that sort of mismatch well that's sort of why i was thinking about the illusionism business because one way of reading the illusionists i mean who knows because they say different things but one way of reading them is like well we think there are this thing called phenomenal character it's not really there but you know intuitive in it introspectively it seems like there is this thing but it's it we're mistaken there is something called experience but

1:02:56 it doesn't have these properties and so that's what our sort of thoughts where the analogy was came in with what you were the way you're putting things yeah i mean but uh i don't feel like i i sort of gestured toward this but didn't spell it out i think there's room um in the work that i've done so far um to say that there might actually be uh something qualitative and we just haven't got a finger on what it is so like i'm not committed to saying that there isn't um i've raised some questions

1:03:31 um i've sort of like raised considerations against that um but i don't think that they're fully deciding and um partially that's because of the slippery nature of investigating emotions um because we can't do these like lovely controls uh right exactly yeah when we get the uh well we really needed something like perfect vr where you could put people in it's like okay now put them in the snake pit okay now drop them off a thousand foot cliff okay now so i mean but the challenge is that yeah i mean that's right i've thought that too

1:04:04 but the challenge is that different people will respond differently and so you've got to tune it up for each individual and i mean like obviously we could do that but yeah that's very labor-intensive um so yeah frustrating but um so how do you so if the emotions are not individuated by how they feel then i know it's something about their behavior that's going to do it but like what behavior so how do we how do we individuate the emotions like what is the difference between anger and disgust it's

1:04:35 one one is that there's wretching involved and the other is so it's like obviously i think there is a wretched stuff yeah yeah exactly it's not wretching every time so so how do is so maybe this is why i was thinking you could be pushed into the more you know at least the feldman bear category of there being no natural kind because are the borders here so loosey goosey is that a technical term by the way yeah are they so that there's nothing there substantive enough to count as a kind um

1:05:07 [Music] i guess i guess um i'm curious about whether you think that like i guess i want to know what it takes for something to be a natural client like for us to posit um a mental state as a natural kind um when we stop talking about um states like perception so when we move beyond

1:05:39 those or interception um like like why we never move beyond them [Laughter] i i think i think that i'm kidding obviously i know but i think i think like first of all it makes sense to me to start with an individual so um this is going to be intersubjectively shared sometimes like there will be lots of convergence um which is why we're able to recognize emotions in one

1:06:13 another right um but um you know that doesn't mean that there isn't sort of like now whether we should consider the different emotions all part of one category of like one natural kind that is emotion that's a question um that some people are invested in um but like whether there are loose borders around disgust i mean i don't it doesn't seem to me that um the fact that some cases of

1:06:47 disgust involved wretching and some don't means that the borders are so loose that we ought not to consider like if we're able i mean once again and this sounds like really behaviorist but if we're able to sort of like understand and interpret one another's behavior and make um you know successful predictions on the basis of these kinds of emotion attributions then it seems like there's something that's happening that um is driving behavior in a way that um you know is is coherent enough to call

1:07:22 a unified state um and it might be that way we look very closely we find that this is a bunch of like like memory perhaps when we look very closely we'll see that the one thing that we call discussed is actually you know operating on several different mechanisms or something like that i don't know that um we're in a position to answer that question for most emotions um i think that joe thinks we're in a position to say something like that for fear maybe um but um but then so how do you so what is the

1:07:57 difference between fear and disgust and anger on on your way of doing these things yeah just like a package like it's so that's sort of what you were saying basically like if if you kind of have like this homeostatic cluster view maybe you know of natural kinds and maybe that's the sort of thing i'm talking about just kind of this general clustering feature is that sort of where you were yeah that's where i lean and um yeah i somebody asked me recently about necessary and sufficient conditions for emotions and like whether we should be really

1:08:30 disappointed that it's looking like we're not going to get those um and and i yeah i'm not really concerned about getting necessary and sufficient conditions for emotions in the class nor for individual emotions but yeah so for sure this kind of blustery picture um seems like the right way to go i mean like at this point the way i see things is i'm sort of like pointing to what what we should go about explaining rather than an ex like a characterization of like what the thing is that underlies um the thing that we're trying to

1:09:04 explain um yeah that's sort of where i see my work now is pointing so it's like meta kind of meta yeah like how should we go about studying this stuff meta methodology or something yeah i guess so okay interesting i mean i like the idea but i guess i'm always suspicious of abuse that try to approach consciousness without starting with the consciousness bit um but is there yeah so why why i know you've given some arguments already we talked about that

1:09:38 but other than that is is that the whole case against the starting from the inside like my feelings paper is that the whole case yeah i think so i mean like i find it just so frustrating when you get right down to it um uh when it comes to i didn't pass yeah yeah um and and so once again i mean like maybe this is too wishy-washy but i do think that

1:10:10 like it might be that there is a role for beginning with consciousness but i want to like i want to i don't want to start by assuming that that's the right place right yeah yeah exactly so it's it's not that you want to rule it out but it's like you want to give the other side a shot first because obviously it's obvious often not it's dismissed out of hand yeah yeah interesting okay um well i have kept you here longer than you wish so let me just ask you then if sort of finally

1:10:44 if there's anything that you were expecting would come up that you were hoping we would talk about that hasn't and the answer let me know but i always like to check uh that's a great question i guess um i don't know i think i sort of imagined that i would be giving you like the feel from my from my feelings paper um and and talking about um the the ways that i think uh it should be developed but um you can still give me the spiel if you want to

1:11:18 uh no i mean i think that we worked through various parts of it um in kind of like a very chatty way uh and that's kind of the way i tend to talk so makes sense yeah uh yeah i mean it's really been it's really fun to get to talk about um emotions and consciousness i mean i think people are having this you've been having this conversation about emotions and consciousness for some time um but um

1:11:52 i mean i i think it's it's fun to get to talk about it i think it's a bit a bit new yeah no it's definitely something i'm happy to see more of so i'm glad there's people like you doing cool work on it um because you're right there i mean that's one of the reasons why joe and i started writing that paper to begin with back in like 2015 yeah remember whatever yeah yeah it was like so frustrating because like these you guys talking about the same stuff but did you never talk to each other but i was like let's get together uh so thank you for that i appreciate that but i also think your work is very

1:12:24 fantastic i i learned a lot from reading it and um uh if you're willing to come back someday we can talk more about the uh the details of the other paper yeah and you'll have some other cool papers by then i'm sure yeah yeah i'd love to um thanks so much for having me cool all right so hang on just a second i'll say bye foreign thanks again very much appreciate it all right we're free