Great that you have made productive contact with Panksepp. I'm assuming you are sharing the full text of your HCT theory with him. It would be interesting to read any email exchanges you have with him as you compare your two projects and perspectives. Is it possible that he and you would engage in a dialogue that you could put up on your website?
His current thinking is very similar to that which Edgar Michell expresses in the paper I linked last week. (I'll provide that link again and add links to extensions of Mitchell's and colleagues' theories summarized on Mitchell's quantrek website.)
The recent Panksepp paper he sent you and that you've linked for us here is magnificent in my opinion. I hope that @smcder, @Soupie, and others will read it and that we can all discuss its significance for the issues we've been discussing in this thread.
A few quotes from the Panksepp paper:
“And what is an affect in the dynamic sense? It is in any case something highly composite. An affect includes in the first place particular motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings; the latter are of two kinds—perceptions of the motor actions that have occurred and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which, as we say, give the affect its keynote. But I do not think that with this enumeration we have arrived at the essence of an affect. We seem to see deeper in the case of some affects and to recognize that the core which holds the combination we have described together is the repetition of some particular significant experience. This experience could only be a very early impression of a very general nature, placed in the prehistory not of the individual but of the
species” ([28], p. 395).
"Cortical removal did not interrupt the presence of the conscious “self”, of conscious being, it merely deprived the patient of “certain forms of information” ([43], p. 65)."
"Contrary to LeDoux and the other corticocentric theorists: all the cortical varieties of consciousness depend upon the integrity of these subcortical structures, not the other way round. This in not to deny that higher cortical regions add much to consciousness. Of course they do. But the evolutionary “roots” of consciousness are to be found elsewhere, and they are probably affective [4,44]."
pg. 10 ". . .it gives rise to a background state of “being”; this aspect of the body is the subject of perception. We may picture this type of consciousness as the neurodynamic page upon which, or from which, exteroceptive experiences are written in higher brain regions. (This is also what binds experiences together; perception happens to a unitary, embodied subject; cf. the binding problem.)
"It is important to note that these “states” of the body-as-subject involve not only varying levels of consciousness (e.g., sleep/waking) but also varying qualities of consciousness. Interoceptive consciousness, too, is phenomenal; it “feels like” something. Above all, the phenomenal states of the body-as-subject are experienced affectively. Affects, rather than representing discrete external events, are experienced as positively and negatively valenced states. Their valence is determined by how changing internal conditions relate to the probability of survival and reproductive success. At this level of the brain, therefore, homeostasis is inseparable from consciousness. Whereas the classical sensory modalities represent discrete external (knowledge-generating and objective) noetic happenings, affective consciousness represents diffuse internal (automatically evaluative and subjective) anoetic reactions to those happenings. Affectivity is, in this respect, a unique experiential modality. But that is not all it is; affectivity is an intrinsic property of the brain which is expressed in the emotions, and emotions are, above all, distinct forms of somatic motor discharge coordinated with supportive patterns of autonomic change. However, these emotional expressions also “feel like” something, in diversely valenced ways. The empirical evidence for the feeling component are simply based on the highly replicable fact that wherever in the brain one can artificially evoke coherent emotional response patterns with deep brain stimulation, those shifting states uniformly are accompanied by “rewarding” and “punishing” states of mind [2,4]."
I think David Chalmers will be especially interested by this Panksepp paper and I look forward to seeing how he and other consciousness researchers respond to it. Please link us to any such responses you encounter in ongoing philosophy of mind papers.
His current thinking is very similar to that which Edgar Michell expresses in the paper I linked last week. (I'll provide that link again and add links to extensions of Mitchell's and colleagues' theories summarized on Mitchell's quantrek website.)
The recent Panksepp paper he sent you and that you've linked for us here is magnificent in my opinion. I hope that @smcder, @Soupie, and others will read it and that we can all discuss its significance for the issues we've been discussing in this thread.
A few quotes from the Panksepp paper:
“And what is an affect in the dynamic sense? It is in any case something highly composite. An affect includes in the first place particular motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings; the latter are of two kinds—perceptions of the motor actions that have occurred and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which, as we say, give the affect its keynote. But I do not think that with this enumeration we have arrived at the essence of an affect. We seem to see deeper in the case of some affects and to recognize that the core which holds the combination we have described together is the repetition of some particular significant experience. This experience could only be a very early impression of a very general nature, placed in the prehistory not of the individual but of the
species” ([28], p. 395).
"Cortical removal did not interrupt the presence of the conscious “self”, of conscious being, it merely deprived the patient of “certain forms of information” ([43], p. 65)."
"Contrary to LeDoux and the other corticocentric theorists: all the cortical varieties of consciousness depend upon the integrity of these subcortical structures, not the other way round. This in not to deny that higher cortical regions add much to consciousness. Of course they do. But the evolutionary “roots” of consciousness are to be found elsewhere, and they are probably affective [4,44]."
pg. 10 ". . .it gives rise to a background state of “being”; this aspect of the body is the subject of perception. We may picture this type of consciousness as the neurodynamic page upon which, or from which, exteroceptive experiences are written in higher brain regions. (This is also what binds experiences together; perception happens to a unitary, embodied subject; cf. the binding problem.)
"It is important to note that these “states” of the body-as-subject involve not only varying levels of consciousness (e.g., sleep/waking) but also varying qualities of consciousness. Interoceptive consciousness, too, is phenomenal; it “feels like” something. Above all, the phenomenal states of the body-as-subject are experienced affectively. Affects, rather than representing discrete external events, are experienced as positively and negatively valenced states. Their valence is determined by how changing internal conditions relate to the probability of survival and reproductive success. At this level of the brain, therefore, homeostasis is inseparable from consciousness. Whereas the classical sensory modalities represent discrete external (knowledge-generating and objective) noetic happenings, affective consciousness represents diffuse internal (automatically evaluative and subjective) anoetic reactions to those happenings. Affectivity is, in this respect, a unique experiential modality. But that is not all it is; affectivity is an intrinsic property of the brain which is expressed in the emotions, and emotions are, above all, distinct forms of somatic motor discharge coordinated with supportive patterns of autonomic change. However, these emotional expressions also “feel like” something, in diversely valenced ways. The empirical evidence for the feeling component are simply based on the highly replicable fact that wherever in the brain one can artificially evoke coherent emotional response patterns with deep brain stimulation, those shifting states uniformly are accompanied by “rewarding” and “punishing” states of mind [2,4]."
I think David Chalmers will be especially interested by this Panksepp paper and I look forward to seeing how he and other consciousness researchers respond to it. Please link us to any such responses you encounter in ongoing philosophy of mind papers.
Last edited:
