The
definition of emotion that has been outlined points out towards a clear link of
the emotional processes with the survival scenarios and their objects. In what way are emotions oriented towards the objects? Does it make
sense to speak of emotions that do not correspond to a scenario and its
objects? We have seen that the neural system of self-stimulation is activated independently of external stimuli, and the
same can be said about the sexual system of many species. In both cases, first
appears the emotion and later it gets oriented towards objects and scenarios.
The animal organism has energetic and reproductive needs to cover, and the loss
of balance is continuous and periodic: emotions are also motivated by the
internal scenarios of the organism. The problems arise as a consequence of the
distinction that some psychologists make between affective states and emotions,
the latter defined by the specific difference of being affective states oriented towards
objects.[1]
Such a distinction makes sense from the point of view from which we are
discussing emotions, for there are affective states that are exclusively linked
to biochemical causes, and they would seem not to have the
need whatsoever of an object or scenario that may provide a survival content.
Thus, in depression, or in chronic anxiety, the
stimulation of the emotional system is not related to a specific scenario,
but it remains independently active due to a problem in the functioning of the
homeostatic equilibrium, and such activation is not an
adequate response to the present experience of the organism, therefore, it can neither be
considered like a cognitive process, whether implicit or explicit, of adaptation
to the environment. This
would justify the distinction between affective state and emotion, if it were
not for the fact that there are processes which are neither linked to scenarios
nor to physical objects, and whose cognitive-vital content is
more than doubtful, as in the case of the fear of a supernatural power,[2]
but which are actually considered emotional phenomena. In what sense a state of chronic
anxiety would be different from the chronic fear of a supernatural power? The
first one is usually considered pathology whereas the second is the adequate attitude of
the religious devotee, in both an object is lacking,
although they can create one very easily. The object that is constructed by the
imagination of the religious devotee is the figure of a myth, that
can be concretized in the social affective actions of that tale, but the
devotee can discontinue the experience of his/her object of devotion without
losing by it his/her religious emotion,[3]
for once it has been initiated due to a specific scenario it can continue as an
emotional process now without any cognitive content,
either as a mere ailment or as a pathology.[4]
The pathological case, for its part, will objectify its affection in an
analogous manner, either taken as raw material for the ordinary actions, independently
of how distorted they may be,[5]
or as mere ideations derived from myths or personal experiences. Emotions can be
oriented or be based on physical and psychophysical objects and scenarios (ideation processes),
whether with a cognitive content corresponding to a state of affairs or merely
imaginary, because what is relevant to the emotion is to initiate a protocol of
response, which it will be more or less successful depending on whether the
valuation may have or may have not a correspondence with
the circumstances of the situation in relation to the subject. In this sense,
is not so relevant to distinguish between affective state and emotion, and it
is simpler to call emotional pathology
to those activations of the emotional neural systems that require a deliberate[6]
external biochemical action in order to return to a condition of equilibrium within
the general homeostasis of the organism.
We can
define basic emotions as those processes of primary consciousness of a biological organism that have been evolutionarily
protocolized, both at the level of stimulation as well as that of the response to such stimuli, based
on internal and external survival scenarios constituted by perceptual and/or conceptual
categorizations, which
are relevant for individual and collective survival actions. The assignation of
these processes to an ego is common among different neuroscientific authors, the term used is SELF (Simple Ego-Type Life Form), and it is
considered that this SELF emerges during the early development of motor
processes that are coherently organized in the mid-brain,
although it is also represented in relation to more complex functions of the
most evolved brain,[7]
that is to say, even though its origin may be in the global mappings, it is
operational in more complex structures. According to Daniel Siegel, the
SELF is created by associations of unconscious processes, which, when being synthesized,
allow a better strategic manipulation, although there are processes of
perception, memory, or even
of abstract cognition, that
proceed to a great extent without consciousness involvement.[8] The thesis of cognition processes which are developed
in unconscious manner is widely accepted by contemporary neuroscience. It
should not come as a surprise, for cognition has been biased by the postulates
of rational psychology as mere rational (even syllogistic)
cognition, while the whole phenomenon of the living organism is a continuous
display of cognitive-adaptive
processes.
However,
if we accept the ego (SELF)
hypothesis as a memory association of unconscious processes in cases of primary consciousness from which survival strategies are coordinated, we are affirming
that consciousness is composed of unconscious elements, which is equivalent to
say that there is an entity that is conscious of the unconscious, thus a paradoxical
affirmation. According to this we could think that the ego is something like a
unit-entity in the apperception of the protocolary functioning of the organism,
but the restrictive character that some emotions have upon others, entails that some systems
will be blocked in favor of others, thus, the supposition of such a unit-entity
does not have a neurological ground, beyond the unity of the plurality of
elements of the system that we postulate in subsequent cognitive analyses.
In fact,
the responses of each emotion separately are perfectly protocolized without the
intervention of an ego, as
shown in animals which do not possess processes of primary
consciousness. An
alternative would be to think that the emotional responses on the whole condition the organism
to a unity of action, and that the primary ego is but a discrete register of
these actions, something like an indexation process of response scenarios, already
representational, in which the repetition of the action generates a subject in
relation to a set of objects. This primary ego would be fuzzy in times when
there is no emotional action, and focalized in times of action. As
we have seen, with the exception of the system of self-stimulation, all the
other emotional systems have a collective function (rage and fear not only collective), therefore it makes sense
to say that the emotional systems are longer active in collective
actions than in individual ones, and that for this reason, the
focalization of the ego is developed and strengthened in collective emotional communication. It is
in this context of the communicative unity of action in which the egoic function has vital advantages, for it allows
the formation of more complex organic structures after simpler individual ones which
unite with each other by means of the communication of emotions,
integrating strategies from different fields of the vital experience.
The ego seems to have its origin in the integrated
action of the emotional responses, developing itself progressively afterwards
in the communicative processes of such responses. Amongst animals, communications
are sequences of basic emotions, which
regulate behavior in a reaffirming manner stabilizing the
individual organism within a group, and generating at the same time an
individual and a collective identity.[9]
Emotions provided the basic lexicon for the construction of behavioral
protocols that are communicated within a collective with homeostatic ends, at the same time that regulated the
individual homeostatic equilibrium around the indexing memory of the ego, as a reaffirmation of the
successful survival memories. In
terms of the group, the emotional protocols give the common memory heritage, determining
something like a collective ego that is actuated in emotional relations and is indexed in terms of
individual experiences. Contrary to what happened with the categorizations of the neural systems, which
were syntactic biochemical processes, this communication is semantico-pragmatic, regardless of the use
of phonetic or gestural signs. In the case of animals, whose phonetic
communicative abilities are quite limited, the gestures, the
body postures, and in general, the actions, complement communication.[10]
In animal ritual protocols, movements and body features are elaborated and
exaggerated with the goal of activating emotional neural structures in the participants of the
ritual, systems that will be affected by the sequences and repetitions of the
specific signals that constitute it, producing neuro-endocrine changes that
will affect the homeostasis of the participant organisms.[11]
Gestures, as George H. Mead postulated, can be understood as primitive
stages of the communicative act that will evolve until becoming an interaction
mediated by symbols in which the egoic consciousness emerges.[12]
Animal
social communication, insofar
as it is limited to a basic emotional repertoire, is only a proto-communication.
Some classical communication theories, like
that of Mead,
postulated the specific difference of human communication with respect to animal
communication in a type of egoic activity which was called generalized consciousness of the other
(generalized other), that which is produced when
we observe our actions from the point of view of a supposed general social
persona. Within
a context of multiple communicative interactions, as the one occurring in ordinary
social experience, to take
the standpoint of the other involves to put oneself in the place of many
others, or what is the same thing, to have a clear image of the group’s
identity. To that
end, it is necessary to be already in communication with the group, there has
to be a minimum consciousness of the generalized
other, but this is only attainable, according to Mead’s postulates,
through the communicative action, something that would seem paradoxical,
for in order to be able to communicate we should already
have knowledge of the group’s identity. It involves our known paradox about the origin of language, which
occurs because neither Mead nor social behaviorism have a theory that explains the formation of
the basic lexicon which makes communication possible, of that which allows an
interlocutor to interiorize the information he receives and be able to make an
interpretation with respect to the same frame of reference. The theory of basic
emotions covers this vacuum, and avoids the paradox,
for the communicative action was already initiated before the
appearance of humans, and our symbolic language, more
sophisticated than that of animals, was
based on the interpretative conditions of possibility given by the emotional protocols. The
action of taking the attitude of the
other is possible due to the emotional uniformity within and without the species,
which leads, without solution of continuity, from gesture to symbol, and with
such a process, to the appearance of an ego which is communicator and interlocutor at the
same time. The idea of taking the
attitude of the other must be understood metaphorically, like a semantic equivalence of having the same emotional constitution as
the other. The communicator and interlocutor ego is but the
particularization of the communicative node, whose complexity will be proportional to that of the emotional protocols that are being communicated, from
which the ego itself has emerged. Although is true -as it has been thoroughly
documented in numerous neurological, anthropological and linguistic theories- that the functional architecture of human communication, contributed to make
communication more complex. Thus, the morphological changes that followed
bipedalism produced cranial changes that allowed a descent of the larynx and
the appearance of a supralaryngeal space by which we can produce a sonorous
articulation with more vowels and in general with an increased capacity for
more complex and varied sounds. However, the development of a more sophisticated
language does not depend exclusively of this higher phonetic ability, in fact,
we can imagine languages that are phonetically poor with which we can express
complex ideas, even
though a better ability to produce and categorize phonetic objects favored by a
wealth in means, added to a highly active social life like that of hominids, contributed
positively to the linguistic praxis, which
in turn propitiated a more specialized neural development. The complexity of
our communications is equivalent to that of our social life, moreover, both
things are the same phenomenon, a product of a symbolic development whose
ground is semantic: the valuation protocols of the emotional system which allow to reduce the multiplicity
of experience to those actions that are relevant for homeostasis,
processes of semantic simplification which allow a higher syntactic effectiveness.
In the
same way that we speak of homeostatic equilibria for individual organisms, we can do
so for social organisms,[13]
after all, it involves a concept whose extension is given by states of
equilibrium in biological systems, and a human community can be thought
of from this point of view. Socio-cultural homeostasis can be defined as the set of processes that
human social organisms perform in order to maintain an environment of equilibrium in their survival activities. These processes are not
necessarily the most efficient energetically speaking, as our current
historical development shows, even though they are always adaptations to the
imposed conditions of the environment and available technology. The
relationship between cultural and biological homeostasis is much closer than it would seem at first
glance: in fact, the socio-cultural advancements can lead to changes in the genome,
as it has occurred in the case of the adaptation to lactose.[14]
In neural terms, the socio-cultural homeostasis begins at a subcortical level, for our communities are grounded on
basic emotional regulative principles, though these are processed
and elaborated neocortically, with
the intervention of categorizations and representations of n-ary consciousness which correspond to the complete activity of
human language, in
which the emotional cognitive abilities are widened and strengthened by the
use of reason,
allowing the development of strategies of anticipation and delay of vital
scenarios as well as the elaboration of more complex
degrees of symbolization. The
basic emotions together with the n-ary processes of group
consciousness provide the semantic content expressed in myths and rites, actions that shape the homeostatic regulation and agglutinate the identity of the social organism. Myths can be thought
of as the evolution of the human sphere of the protocolary and ritualistic communication of mammals, and as
such, arise from the spontaneous communicative development of our language in their social
functions of emotional homeostatic regulation. In the same way that the individual
ego, as
neural process, evolves from its states of primary and intermittent
consciousness, taking form in emotional protocolary processes and becoming the n-ary
interlocutor that emerges in the actions of social communication, thus evolve
the contents of human communication, in a range that spans from the emotional protocols linked to survival to the supernatural and natural myths of higher symbolical constructions. Such
contents are the self-narrative of identity, a supra-personal identity based
on the phenomenon of the emotional language modified by the symbolic language.
[1] This is the thesis of Gerald L. Clore and Andrew
Ortony, in Cognition in Emotion: Always, Sometimes, or Never?. In Cognitive
Neuroscience of Emotion. Ed. Cit. p.p.24-56.
[3] For example, he can stop seeing the figure of his
devotion, like so many instances of saints in the dark night, without losing by it his religious emotion.
[4] Think also about the fear provoked by the
inquisitorial institution of the Catholic Church, not only for the devotees, whose torturers were
cable of making real the objects of their self-satisfied ignorance by means of
torture which produced the emotion of fear, without cognitive content, and
without us being able to think of that fear as a pathology.
[5] See the commentaries that William James makes in
relation to this in the chapter The Sick
Soul, in Varieties of Religious
Experience. Ed. Cit. Especially in p.140.
[6] Or physical, but capable of producing the necessary biochemical effects to make
the neural system return to the condition of equilibrium.
[7] Cf. PAnksepp. Affective
Neuroscience. Ed. Cit. p.309. A concept of ego, such as the SELF or another
analogous inevitably appears when talking about the most complex consciousness processes.
[8] Cf. Daniel J.
Siegel. La Mente en Desarrollo. Trans. Jasone Aldekoa. Editorial Desclée de Brower. Bilbao.
2010. p. 371. (English Edition: Siegel, Daniel J., The
Developing Mind. The Guilford Press. New York. 2012.)
[9] It is interesting in the case of Martina, the
she-goose of K. Lorenz, who by not being able to complete in one occasion a
ritual acquired at home, related with going to a specific place at sunset,
entered into a panic state. See David Eliam et al. Rituals, Stereotypy and Compulsive Behaviour in Humans and Animals. Department
of Zoology. Tel-Aviv University. p.22. Web.
[10] However, the symbolic content of animal language is far superior
to what had been thought some decades ago. Dogs can recognize more than sixty
words (some significantly more), mangoose are capable of transmitting
information about predators, monkeys are capable of counting, etc. Even the
bonobo has been able to understand linguistic commands from a
hidden speaker, orders such as: take the
tomato that is in the microwave. See Ehrlich, Paul R. Naturalezas Humanas: genes, culturas y la perspectiva humana. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico. 2005. p.282.
[11] See the examples about this communication in different
animal species offered by Candace Alcorta and Richard Sosis from the
Connecticut University, in Signals and
Rituals of Human and Animals. p.5. Department of Anthropology. University
of Connecticut. Web.
[12] See George H. Mead, La genesis del
Self y el control social. Reis. No.55. 1991.
p.p.165-186. Web.
[13] Antonio Damasio
does so in Y el cerebro creó al hombre
(Self comes to mind). Ed. Cit. p.p.434 and s.q.
[14] Ibid. p.439.
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