On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: > > I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio > (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure > phenomenon? > > Terren > > http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html
I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
