Curious Emotions: Roots of consciousness and personality in motivated action (Advances in Consciousness Research)

Annotation 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) Curious Emotions......Page 2 Editorial page......Page 3 Title page......Page 4 LCC data......Page 5 Table of contents......Page 6 1. The enactive approach to affective intentionality......Page 10 2. Some preliminary predictions of enactivism......Page 18 3. The “curious” emotions......Page 23 4. Conceptualizing action versus reaction......Page 27 5. Plan of the book......Page 30 1. Preconscious emotional intentionality......Page 34 1. Motivation, conscious emotion, and unconscious emotion......Page 36 2. The murkiness of emotional intentionality......Page 40 3. Aims, objects, triggers, and symbolization-vehicles......Page 42 4. The roles of sensation, interoception, and sensorimotor action imagery......Page 51 2. Motivated attention in action......Page 56 1. Linear versus dynamical causal sequences in the brain......Page 61 2. Conflicting theories with conflicting empirical predictions......Page 66 4. How the Mack and Rock data relate to the two types of hypotheses......Page 72 5. The paradox of early and late selection......Page 78 6. Attention and conscious processing......Page 81 7. Further implications for the problems of attention and consciousness......Page 82 3. Non-consummatory motivations......Page 88 1. Intertheoretic reduction and consummatory-drive reductionism......Page 91 2. The notion of “extropy”: A non-reductive force?......Page 98 3. The humanistic notion of “life wish”......Page 104 4. A possible synthesis......Page 108 4. Homeostasis, extropy, and boundary needs as grounding specific emotions......Page 112 1. Physiological evidence for non-consummatory motivation......Page 113 2. Novelty, constraints to freedom, and the action-consciousness connection......Page 124 3. The importance of extropy needs in higher mammals......Page 133 4. Existential requirements for an adequate dynamical theory of emotion......Page 134 5. Toward an integrated physiological and phenomenological account......Page 137 5. Varieties of extended self and personality......Page 140 1. How emotion grounds the various senses of self......Page 147 2. Why not an illusory-choice model?......Page 151 3. The embodied self and the personality......Page 159 4. How can there be knowledge of the self?......Page 167 6. Learning about emotions through the arts......Page 176 1. An enactive dance form for the eye......Page 180 2. Why does art move, and not just entertain?......Page 185 3. Love and other non-consummatory motivations......Page 190 7. Dynamical systems and emotional agency......Page 198 1. The causal power of dynamical systems......Page 202 2. How can top-down systems avoid violating causal closure?......Page 209 3. The emotional brain as an enactive system......Page 216 4. Objections and responses......Page 218 Conclusion......Page 224 References......Page 232 Index......Page 242 The series Advances in Consciousness Research......Page 248 Preconscious Emotional Intentionality -- Motivated Attention In Action : How Emotion Creates Conscious Intentionality -- Non-consummatory Motivations : Extropy And Life Wish In The Self-organization Of Emotion -- Homeostasis, Extropy, And Boundary Needs As Grounding Specific Emotions -- Varieties Of Extended Self And Personality -- Learning About Emotions Through The Arts -- Dynamical Systems And Emotional Agency : A Closer Look. Ralph D. Ellis. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [223]-232) And Index.