An important aspect of emotions that is relatively neglected in both the philosophical and psychological literature is their social manifestation. There is plenty of work on empathy, the role of emotions in morality, and even a growing interest in emotional expression, but all this should be tied together with a …
Today I will summarise the account of pain and pleasure provided in The Emotional Mind. This builds on the account of valent representation that I outlined yesterday. However, the first thing to note that is although valent representation is representation in a valent (i.e. positive or negative) manner, it is …
Yesterday I promised to give an account of valent representation. This is perhaps the core original idea of the book (though it has precedents in Ruth Millikan’s ‘pushmi-pullyu’ representations (1995) and Andy Clark’s ‘action oriented representations’ (1997)). Essentially, valent representation is representation in a valent (i.e. positive or negative) manner. …
Thanks to John and the team for letting me take over the Brains Blog for the week. Over the next five days I’m going to summarise some of the key ideas in my new book The Emotional Mind: A control theory of affective states (Cambridge University Press). The book grew …
We are grateful to Tom Cochrane for blogging this week on The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States (Cambridge, 2019). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here.
So let’s circle back to the combination problem for panpsychism, that got me on this topic in the first place. Despite reading and writing a lot about it, I’m still never quite sure what counts as ‘solving’ the combination problem. Often I read papers that say ‘here’s the combination problem’ …
In the last post we took physical systems (organisms, brains, solar systems) that contained each other as parts, and asked which were conscious. But some philosophers think this is misguided from the get-go: no physical system, whatever its features, can strictly be a subject of consciousness, but can only ‘support’ …
