Sunday, 10 March 2024 ------------------------ Continuing with chapter 7, I'd like to talk about social reality and emotions. First, I have become more convinced that emotions should be seen as constructions, seeing only our affective feelings (variable by valence and arousal) as innate. Our ability to configure our face can serve functional purposes without emotion applied to them. For our eyes, it can adjust light intake and peripheral vision. For our nose, it can adjust our intake of air and odours. For our mouth, it can improve mechanical digestion (chewing and salivating food). There may be more functions I did not think of. I imply with this that our facial muscles and their configurations can serve purposes other than expressing ourselves. In the same manner our hands serve purposes outside expressions. Yet just as our face can be used for expression, our hands can too, like expressing emotions such as giving the middle finger, or even express a complete language like ASL. To further expand on this, lets say you're in a situation as a prey. Widening your eyes to expand your gaze to spot danger makes sense, and could explain why we may associate emotions of fear with widening eyes. Likewise, as the predator, you may squint your eyes to focus on your target, and that could explain why we may apply emotions of aggression to squinting eyes. At sudden detection of danger, we may in an instant open our mouth, deeply breathe in, resulting in quick intake of oxygen to prepare muscles for swift action. This may explain why we associate a wide open, gasping mouth with emotions of shock or surprise. That was three simple examples of how our facial configuration can firstly serve a physical mechanical function itself for regulating our body's state for survival. Then secondly, apply concepts like emotions to reason changes in our body in relation to the context to improve its response time and accuracy. We use concepts to efficiently reason (predict) overall goal / function in particular context (bottom-up) and then cascade abstract goals / mental concepts all the way down (top-down) to large amounts of raw physical outputs (actions in physical reality) and future predicted inputs to predict and execute next set of outputs before we receive the real inputs or feedback from physical reality. This overall cycling process, involves thousands of prediction loops, running in parallel, in different levels of concept abstraction, from bottom-up to top-down. For example, should I flee or fight? With concepts, we can quickly process all the input (our body, our opponent, the surroundings) into abstract goals, let's say it predicts fleeing as best option, and then transforms that abstract goal (fleeing) into the vast outputs, executed in parallel to accomplish fleeing. This process improves the more, varied life experience had (collecting bits of data in varying level of abstraction, usually starting with low level / tangible data), and reoccurrences of particular encounters / context (fine-tuning probabilities ruling the assembly of the bits of data). The explanation of the second level of function got drawn out, but remember we're talking about the different levels of function. First was physical mechanical function, second was physical perception function by concepts, and now thirdly, social perception function by concepts applied on top of physical perception. As in we apply concepts like emotions from their social functions (social reality) to facial configurations (physical reality). I described it as three levels of functions, as I didn't talk about social mechanics yet. I think it's better to categorise it by physical reality and social reality. In physical reality, we have physical mechanics and physical perception that improves our physical mechanics by physical goal-oriented concepts. In social reality, by social perception, we create social mechanics by social goal-oriented concepts. Remember concepts, like an emotion as fear, can have a physical function and a social function. Concepts don't exist as things in our brain, but are constructed ad hoc, starting with its goal / function. Now to actually talk about social reality and emotions. As said in previous writing, all concepts in social reality function as collective intentionality. For emotion concepts in social reality, the functions of its collective intentionality can be distinguished as 'social communication' and 'social influence'. An emotion's function as social communication, is to help us understand the reason for why another person is behaving a certain way in a certain context. For example, a person is sweating and breathing heavily. If the person is wearing a suit, waiting to be interviewed for a job, we may infer they have a negative affect emotion like anxiety, while if the person is wearing running shoes, and outside jogging, we may infer they have a positive affect emotion like determination. The mental state inferred depends on many more details of the context than given in these examples of course, but if we don't share the same concepts, we may infer differently in the same context in variation to how different we perceive social reality, just like how we may disagree on the colours of physical reality. Though, differences in social reality will vary much greater than physical reality, as it's constructed on top as a purely abstract, mental reality. In physical reality we may have different perceptions, but there's still a physical, tangible element we can examine and measure, and reach collective, objective perceptions or descriptions of it by using concepts such as the metric system, measuring the wavelength of light in nanometers. An emotions function as social influence, is to be able to regulate other people's body state. An emotion concept can encapsulate a lot in a single word or body gesture. Not only a mental state but also describe the physical setting and social setting the emotion takes place. For example, the word 'hygge' in Denmark encapsulates all three. A mental state (positive low-arousal affect, cozy, safe, content), the physical setting (comfortable, sheltered, warmth, food), and the social setting (friendly, relaxed, small gathering, family, friends). Even if you don't know the word, hygge, you can still gain an understanding of what it is by the concepts I combined. That is called 'conceptual combination', but may not convey the full understanding of the word. In this instance, I used general words to describe hygge. I'd say the mental state and social setting has less variation, while the physical setting may vary more on the context such as weather, the time of the year, shared preferences of the people gathering. Back to social influence, an example could be a specific word that encapsulates some sort of battle cry used in battle, that can make killing other people positive and appropriate in this context. I think speeches like I have a dream by MLK or the speech in wolf of wall street shows this function well too. Having more words to describe emotions, is called 'emotional granularity'. It allows you to better reason your affective feelings in a given context. This has made me curious, as I've also said in a previous writing, to learn more words for emotions. Regarding what is an emotion or not, I'd say one should not get caught up in the balance between mental state, physical and social state contained in the word. It's more easier to see a word only describing a mental state as an emotion but you'll also notice it's limited in its ability to reason and explain the context. I think it can be useful to use the prototype that arises in your mind when you use a word. If it doesn't bring forth a tangible object or place, tangible action, tangible description, so on, it's probably an emotion concept. I mostly wrote the last part because I got confused myself but I think this makes sense. Also some words I used here and ways to model it was for my own interpretation, just so you know it's not how the book said it exactly. I forgot, when you're in a new culture, you're like a new baby again trying to understand the social reality here. This process of learning new social reality, emotions specifically, is 'emotion acculturation'. In the beginning, this is taxing on the body, as you're having to resolve prediction errors, but as you start predicting more correctly, it gets lets taxing, duh.