Emotions as emergent properties

E. Walsh
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Abstract

In recent decades, affective scientists have begun using concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory (DST) to characterise emotional processes. This article considers how the concept of emergence might be used to develop this approach. Emotions are explicated as  ‘emergent products’ that diachronically constrain the operations of their parts in virtue of feedback loops (a classical feature of nonlinear dynamical systems). The explication is shown to be broadly consistent with what is sometimes called ‘pattern’ emergence. Casting emotions as emergent patterns is shown to shed light on a major conceptual and empirical challenge emotion theorists have faced over the past century: identifying and measuring the presence of emotional episodes (Lindquist et al., 2012; Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014), dubbed here the ‘boundary problem’ (following Colombetti, 2014). In particular, the explication suggests seeing the emotional ‘signatures’ thought to accompany emotional episodes as fragile and context-bound: likely to hold under a relevant class of interventions (Woodward, 2005), but not without exception beyond that class. This in turn may suggest a need to significantly revise the statistical methods currently used to measure the presence of emotional ‘signatures’. The casting of emotions as emergent patterns also functions as a further case study supporting the value of ‘pattern emergence’ (Winning & Bechtel, 2019) as a powerful vehicle for characterising the objects of investigation — compound and context-sensitive — ubiquitous in the biological sciences.
情绪作为涌现属性
近几十年来,情感科学家开始使用动态系统理论(DST)的概念和工具来描述情感过程。本文考虑如何使用涌现的概念来发展这种方法。情感被解释为“紧急产品”,它凭借反馈回路(非线性动力系统的经典特征)对其部分的操作进行了历时性约束。这种解释被证明与有时被称为“模式”涌现的现象大致一致。将情绪视为涌现模式,揭示了情感理论家在过去一个世纪面临的主要概念和经验挑战:识别和测量情绪事件的存在(Lindquist et al., 2012;Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014),在这里被称为“边界问题”(继Colombetti, 2014)。特别是,该解释建议将伴随情绪发作的情绪“特征”视为脆弱的和受环境约束的:可能在相关的干预类别下成立(Woodward, 2005),但并非没有例外。这反过来可能表明,有必要对目前用于测量情感“特征”存在的统计方法进行重大修改。将情绪塑造为涌现模式也可以作为一个进一步的案例研究,支持“模式涌现”的价值(Winning & Bechtel, 2019),作为表征研究对象的有力工具——复合和上下文敏感——在生物科学中无处不在。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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