Rosen and Self-perception

[Nick Thompson]

All,

Sorry to be so garrulous -- I am going away on Saturday and I feel like I am trying to pack a whole Summer-In-Santa-Fe into the next 24 hours.  

There has been talk of Robert Rosen both on the FRIAM list and at a recent blender.  I have been reading Rosen --the section on functional entailment in Life Itself -- at an English Major pace.  But he rewards persistence, which is a high virtue in a mathematician.  

I keep thinking that there is something Rosenish in my own work, so I was wondering if the Roseners on the list would take a look at the attached passage and tell me what they thought.  

Thanks,

Nick






Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Nick wrote:

"This way of looking at emotions identifies them as Situation/Response
relations.  Just as experienced features of the environment can lead to
responses, [E1 -> R1], so these feature response patterns can themselves
be patterns that constitute new experienced features that, in turn, can
lead to new response [E2 -> R2], where E2 = [E1 - > R1].  In the New
Realist thought, the experience of William James's charging bear is just
the fact that one's flight behavior highlighted the bear.  In this
sense, being fearful is normally an experience of the environment, not
an experience of an emotion."

This approach to understanding fear seems to require that the individual
modulating a response learn to re-interpret stimuli, as opposed to
processing their feelings before making an evident behavioural response.
  With fear in the form of anxiety, the environment will be not be
obvious aspects of the environment, but recollections of past
environments, or models of new ones (in both cases possibly exaggerated
but not evident).  

Is it known from functional imaging or other experiments whether
memories and imagination must be routed through the amygdala (or other
relevant structures) in the same way that direct perception is?   From
an evolutionary perspective, it's not obvious to me why it would have to
be.    If I go to a suspenseful film, I may or may not engage in the
story, and thus experience emotions or not.

Marcus