Epistemology of Emotion

Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition. Then, it seems, no one knows.

― Fehr & Russell, 1984

The human brain is inconceivably complex. Billions of connected neurons form the substrate for diffuse interactions which somehow encompass all of conscious and nonconscious experience. Discovering any consistent patterns from that raw chaos is a tremendous undertaking, and moving beyond patterns and into a causal understanding is even more difficult.^{panksepp-parsimony panksepp-indirect}

Navigating this chaos cogently is difficult, but not impossible. From past research, there is a clear path to validating a functional theory of "basic emotions".

 Behavioral Clustering

You are told to repeatedly pick numbers between 1 and 10. You pick 1, 5, 3, 5, 5, 1, 3, ... and your picks go on, only every picking 1, 3, or 5. Despite having 10 options, one can infer that you effectively pick from a less complex space.

The first step in emotional epistemology is clustering emotional outputs. From the vast number of possible facial configurations, some are far more common than others. You can generally look at a human's face and understand them to be angry, or bored, or sad, or any of a limited set of emotions, or else apparently blank and emotionless. Only on rare occassions, someone will make a "funny face", incongruent with your expectations. Empathy and emotional communication is greatly facilitated by this intelligibility. This facial intelligibility is not merely rooted in cultural understanding― emotional expressions transcend culture, and even transcend our human species.^{emotions-universal emotions-interspecies}

The clustering of emotional expression presents us with evidence that there are, at the very least, meaningful clusters of emotional experience which induce sparse responses.

{/ addl: Heider-Simmel animations, imputing emotions from behavior? Cross-species behavioral emotional inference? "efferent clustering" /}

 Trigger Equivalence Classes

After clustering emotional outputs, the next step is to determine the situational inputs which generate those emotional outputs. We can call the set of situations which might induce an emotion the "trigger" for that emotion. A good model of an emotional trigger accurately predicts whether an emotion will be expressed in a given situation.

{/ addl: ethology school... "afferent equivalence classes" /}

 Neurological Intermediaries

Once there is a clear mapping from situational inputs to emotional expression outputs, neuroscientists can experiment to determine the causal path between the inputs and outputs. The experiments general take one of two forms ― suppression or stimulation. In suppressive experiments, scientists inhibit, suppress, disrupt, or lesion subsystems in the brain. If disruption of a subsystem changes an otherwise clear input/output relationship, then we know that subsystem is somehow involved in that input/output relationship as an intermediary. In simulative experiments, scientists do the opposite. If that stimulation induces the output relationship when the inputs are not present, then that is also evidence that subsystem is involved as an intermediary.^{non-uniqueness}

Establishing neurological intermediaries bring emotional theories into the realm of technology. Ultimately, the neurological theory of basic emotions has established technology for inducing or suppressing emotional behavior, while other theories have yielded no such technologies.

 Folk Psychology Consilience

Despite the methodological difficulties, billions of people use emotional inference in their lives every day. While it is important to never slack on rigor, ultimately the purpose of theories is to be useful to people. Some models of emotions ignore usefulness to laymen. The most useful model of emotions is one which ties in naturally to existing models. If a rigorous methodological approach converges on a model similar to that which has culturally evolved over thousands of years, so much the better.

{/* addl:

• The Insufficiency of Behaviorism ??? statelessness / statefulness
• Ekman arguments, Panksepp arguments */}