Product Description
This book will focus on the interconnections between self-organization and the intentionality of conscious experience, and the ways in which emotion and the motivation for attention-direction can enter into this relation. In thinking about the intentionality of action, there should be careful consideration of the contributions of action theory, and the ways action can relate to the forming of the understanding of intentional contents (as in Clark 1997; Ellis & Newton 1998a, 2000a, b; Humphrey 2000; Juarrero 1999; Newton 1996). This kind of analysis seems crucial in laying the foundation for an intentionality of affective consciousness grounded in the intentionality of action. In my view, to make sense of these interconnections, there also needs to be discussion of the way the active rather than passive nature of emotional intentionality connects with the notion of self-organization. A good source for exploration of this dimension can be found in Stuart Kauffman's work, and other authors who use self-organization and/or dynamical systems to ground a difference between purposeful action (as in biological organisms) and mere reaction (as in machines). These elements, combined with careful attention to phenomenology (as it relates to neuroscience and analytic philosophy of mind) can form the basis of a systematic attempt to show how emotional consciousness is grounded in an organically self-organizing system that acts to preserve and express its patterns of organization. We then find that many emotions once considered as responses to stimuli, such as fear and anger, can now be thematized as the body's attempt to get rid of or get around impediments to its already ongoing activity. If this dynamical framework goes all the way down to the most basic emotions, then the distinction between higher and lower emotions cannot be drawn by reducing the former to the latter by means of learning schemes or socialization processes. Instead, the higher emotions will be more complex "attractors," or patterns of organization into which the system's endogenous dynamical rhythms motivate it to shift, and in which it strives to remain as long as maintenance of the total system requires it. Nor can the emotions be neatly reduced to elaborately elongated schemes for the attainment of chemical homeostasis. It is true that dynamical systems seek homeostasis, but they also seek to maintain suitably complex and high-energy basins of attraction to fit the life trajectories that various life forms set for themselves, because of the specific ways in which they are self-organized (Juarerro 1999; Prigogine 1996). This interesting fact, that animals do not seem to want merely to satiate consummatory drives, but also seem to intrinsically value adventure, playfulness, and curiosity, will be one of the pivotal issues to be explored throughout this book. A theory as to why there would be such important non-consummatory motivations and emotions will be spelled out in some detail in Chapters 4 and 5. But certain groundwork must be established first. Chapter 1 will provide an overview of the way an enactive approach affects our conceptualization of the basic terms used in discussions of affect and emotion, and our understanding of the intentional meaning as well as the underlying neurophysiology of affective feelings. Since the action/reaction distinction is a pivotal point in this re-conceptualization, Chapters 2 and 3 will then develop an overall concept of self-organization that is capable of making sense of the notion of action in the most fundamental sense (as distinguished from mere reaction), and will show how a capacity for action in this sense allows holistic motivations to cause our bodies to move in executing useful actions. Chapter 2, specifically, will investigate the interrelations of emotion and the imagery associated with emotional intentionality, by taking its cue from the phenomena of inattentional blindness and selective attention and inattention. Emotion will emerge as a determinant rather than just a response to our consciousness of the world - a fundamental component of any conscious experience. Chapter 3 will examine the way genuine mental causation and self-initiated volition, as opposed to mere systems of piecemeal reactions, become possible from the self-organizational standpoint. After this groundwork has been established, Chapter 4 will then develop the idea of non-consummatory motives as specific emotional applications of dynamical systems theory, and Chapter 5 will further ground an understanding of the "higher" affects as related to the organism's needs vis a vis three types of conditions: (1) "extropic" (i.e., non-consummatory); (2) homeostatic; and (3) boundary protection conditions, viewing all three types of conditions as necessary features of complex dynamical systems. Chapter 6 will then combine this point with the previous discussions of non-consummatory affects, taking some clues from the arts and from psychotherapy, and exploring some "existential" issues that arise from awareness of the challenges facing the problems of self-world relationship in general, which are of crucial concern to very intelligent beings. These issues include the problems of death, powerlessness, social alienation and oppression, and the need to experience the value of being per se with enough intensity to justify life's struggles. Here the complicated relationship between an emotion, its intentional objects, and related imagistic triggers will become more clear. Finally, Chapter 7 will show how emotion serves to organize experience into the structure of a self in the sense of personality. Not only primitive agency is made comprehensible by the phenomenon of self-organization, since organisms act rather than merely react, but also it can be seen how reflection-capable subjectivity and overarching unity of the flow of experience within a coherent personality structure become possible through the pattern of motivated attention progressions in the stream of experiences.
