Abstract
Reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are yet to produce a satisfying account of pain’s affective component, the part that makes it painful. The paramount problem here is that that there seems to be no suitable candidate for what affective experience represents. This article suggests that affective experience represents the Darwinian fitness effects of events (roughly, the effects that an event has on a creature’s chances of propagating its genes). I argue that, because of affective experience’s close association with motivation, natural selection will work to bring affect into covariance with the average fitness effects of types of event, and that this covariance makes fitness effects a promising candidate for what affect represents. I also argue that this account is to be preferred to Cutter and Tye’s recent proposal that affect represents harmfulness, and answer an objection that Aydede and Fulkerson recently offered against representational accounts of affect.
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Notes
Henceforth, I use “representationalism” and “reductive representationalism” equivalently.
The terms “tracking” and “covariance” are used equivalently in this article.
That pain has both sensory and affective components is something vividly demonstrated in the effects of a cingulotomy (removal of the anterior cingulate cortex), an operation performed on patients with chronic, excruciating pain. After the operation, patients say that they still feel the pain (i.e., they have the sensory component), but that they do not mind it (i.e., they lack the affective component) (Damasio 1994, 1999). In like fashion, subjects under the influence of morphine rate the affective component of their pain as diminished, but not the sensory component (Kupers et al. 1991). Other experiments demonstrate similar dissociations (Rainville et al. 1997, 1999; Hofbauer et al. 2001).
Tracking theories of representation typically also include a causal clause, so that S represents P iff S is what causes P under optimal conditions (see Tye’s formulation in the next footnote; cf. Fodor 1990).
According to Tye’s theory of representation, “S represents that P = df If optimal conditions were to obtain, S would be tokened in c iff P were the case; moreover, in these circumstances, S would be tokened in c because P is the case” (2000: 136). According to Dretske’s theory of representation, some state S represents property P iff (a) S and only S covaries with P, and (b) it is the function of S to act as an indicator of P. I take Dretske’s appeal to the “function” of S to mean that we would expect S to covary with P under optimal conditions (since this is when it would successfully fulfill its function), and so we can consider Dretske’s theory also to be captured by the generic formulation of a tracking theory I just gave.
Or to something like Millikan’s pushmi-pullyu states (Millikan 1995), a primitive type of intentional content described as having both indicative and imperative content.
Bain (2013) agrees with Cutter and Tye insofar as he believes that affect represents something about a bodily disturbance, namely that it is bad for the person undergoing it; he also accepts aptness to harm as a good candidate for what is meant by “bad” here. To this extent, Bain’s account is susceptible to the same criticisms I will make about Cutter and Tye’s view.
Write Cutter and Tye: “We can understand the notion of harm in relation to the notion of a teleological system. Very roughly, something harms a teleological system to the extent that it hinders that system (or one of its subsystems) from performing its function(s)” (2011: 99–100).
Empirical support for social exclusion causing negative affect can be found in Eisenberger et al. 2003. In this study, subjects were put in a computer-simulated game of catch in which none of the other virtual participants would throw the ball to them.
One might object that C&T’s account is only meant to apply to bodily pain, and not the types of emotional pain being described here. There are, however, reasons to think that the affect accompanying bodily and emotional pain are fundamentally the same (see fn. 14), and therefore deserve a common explanation. At very least, an account providing a common explanation (like the one I offer below) should be preferred to one not doing so, ceteris paribus.
I stress that the terms “polarity” and “intensity” are technical terms created for use specifically in this article; thus these words’ meanings should not be inferred from some of the ways in which they have been used in emotion research (e.g., the way “polarity” has been used in the debate over whether affect is “independent” or “bipolar”; see fn. 15).
It might be doubted whether bodily and non-bodily (or “emotional”) affective experience should be categorized together, but see Helm (2002), Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004), Prinz (2010) and Corns (2014). In any event, my argument does not ultimately depend on bodily and non-bodily affective experience being the same (whatever that amounts to), only their being closely connected to motivation, something to be shown next.
The view that positive and negative affect can occur simultaneously in the same subject—that is, that they are (as they say in emotion research) “independent” of one another (see, e.g., Watson and Tellegen 1985)—is not entirely uncontroversial. According to the opposing view, positive and negative affect are bipolar opposites, with an occurrence of one entailing an absence of the other (see, e.g., Russell and Carroll 1999). (For review of the debate, see Colombetti 2005). I lack space for entering the debate here, but it is worth pointing out that the bipolar model fails to capture cases like the one just discussed (the downhill skier), suggesting that the bipolar model is—at best—only able to accurately describe affective states like moods.
Indeed, sometimes the same event might cause both positive and negative affect, such as when muscle soreness brought on by strenuous exercise feels good or satisfying in some way.
Note that I am not claiming that affective experience is the only source of motivation; the sprinter, for instance, might have a standing urge to follow in his Olympian father’s footsteps.
Corns distinguishes between “motivation” and “motivational oomph”, where they are both constituted by a drive toward or away from some object, but only the former is a “cognized, intentional state” that requires “goal-directedness and flexible, means-end reasoning” (2014: 245). My use of the term “motivation” encompasses both motivation and motivational oomph.
One interesting issue arising here—not just for the present theory, but for any theory hypothesizing a link between affect and motivation—concerns which of the multiple event-types in the vicinity of an affective experience the subject will become motivated to avoid or pursue. Space constraints dictate that this issue be left for future research.
Note that the motivation that affect creates seems to be general, in that it potentially motivates one to do any action that might prevent or promote the type of event that caused the affect. For instance, the negative affect caused by a beating brings about a general motivation to stop the beating, leading to one being potentially motivated to fight back, run away, or do whatever else might end the beating. Interestingly, affect can motivate one to prevent events no longer possible, such as when one ruminates over how one could have prevented the death of her child.
The term “fitness” is not univocal, and so I should explain in more detail how it is to be understood in this article: First, fitness is a propensity: It is an index of the prospects an individual has for propagating its genes, rather than how successful it actually turns out to be (Mills and Beatty 1979). Second, fitness is inclusive, so that an individual’s fitness is a sum, not just of that individual’s propensity to propagate whatever genes are in its own body (its “personal fitness”), but also of its propensity to help propagate duplicates of its genes existing in others’ bodies (e.g., a son’s or a sister’s) (Hamilton 1964a, b; cf. Grafen 2006; but see Nowak et al. 2010; Rousset and Lion 2011 for a reply). Finally, fitness should be considered dynamic. The concept of fitness is often used as a static measure of whatever propensity an individual has to propagate its genes at the beginning of its life. However, for present purposes, an individual’s fitness should be understood as something that changes when the individual undergoes events affecting its chances of propagating its genes in the future.
The notion of fitness used here focuses on selection occurring at the level of individuals, what is sometimes called “Darwinian fitness” (Darwin 1859). But the term “fitness” can be applied to individual genes, in which case “fitness” refers to a gene’s propensity to spread copies of itself. These gene-centered views of fitness have been shown to be mathematically equivalent to Hamilton-style inclusive fitness (see, e.g., Grafen 2006). Not everyone agrees that the only relevant types of fitness are individual- or gene-based. Some evolutionary biologists and philosophers hold that selection also happens at the level of the group (Sober and Wilson 1999), or can involve an organism’s standing attributes (this is “developmental systems” theory; see Gray 1992). The theory of affect offered in this article could be enriched to accommodate these possibilities.
A phenotype is an expression of a genotype, the behavior or trait that a gene gives rise to.
This probably explains things such as why modern humans are prone to overeating, are susceptible to drug addiction, and sometimes favor video games to social interaction: While these activities plausibly tend to decrease fitness, opportunities to engage in them have not been around long enough for natural selection to make them less pleasurable.
Or at least some other scientific property to which fitness effects are eventually reduced.
As indicated earlier (Sect. 2), the theory of representation just appealed to is a generic covariational theory, one broad enough to capture any of the theories that reductive representationalists typically employ (see fn. 6). Given this, the theory of affect offered in this article should turn out to be the correct way to analyze affect, regardless of which of these theories of representation prevail; indeed, this is probably the case even if some kind of consumer semantics (e.g., Millikan 1989) prevails, since it seems that the consumers of affective representations (i.e., the motivational systems) could properly perform their evolved function only when affect covaried with fitness effects.
One might worry that the reasoning employed here leads to the idea that all adaptations represent fitness effects, since adaptations covary with fitness effects; namely, the positive fitness effects that justify their having been selected. There is, however, a conspicuous difference: In the case of whatever system produces affective states, there is another system “consuming” its states (the motivational system), and this other system depends on these states covarying with the fitness effects of event-types if it is to be able to properly perform its function (that of recalibrating a creature’s behavior so that it is more fit). This is something far different from the way in which, e.g., giraffes’ long necks covary with positive fitness effects.
At this point, one might wonder whether all I have done is establish is that affect and fitness effects covary (under optimal conditions), without showing that the one actually represents the other. However, I have shown that fitness effects meet the criteria for representation as laid out by a generic teleologically based theory of content (of the type to which reductive representationalists typically appeal); and so to the extent that such a theory is correct, I have shown that affect represents fitness effects. True, whether such theories are correct continues to be controversial, but of course resolving that issue goes well beyond available space.
Thus the objection looked at below is one of a few interweaving (and complex) lines of argument appearing in Aydede and Fulkerson’s article.
P-concepts are the concepts used when information in an experience is used to non-inferentially form beliefs about environmental properties. So, if someone sees a red object and, on the basis of her experiencing its redness, forms the belief that the object she is looking at is red, the concept used to form this belief would be a p-concept. (For discussion, see Aydede and Fulkerson 2014: 182–183.)
Here we are adopting the “displaced perception” view of introspection, something endorsed (in one form or another) by many reductive representationalists, but most closely identified with Dretske. Whether reductive representationalism has a satisfactory account of introspection is no settled matter (see Aydede 2003). Just as A&F do, I am taking it as an assumption that some kind of displaced perception view can account for introspection.
Indeed, Tye has indicated that we should not expect the fact that one experiences some property P to guarantee any deep insight into what precisely P is. A&F point out this passage by Tye: “On my account, what it is exactly that a given experience or feeling represents need not be accessible to the subject’s cognitive centers, including his or her powers of introspection, except in the most general and uninformative way (for example, as an experience of this sort)” (1996: 52). A&F are skeptical as to whether a bare-bones p-concept like this is “consistent with the demands” of the Transparency Thesis, but do not elaborate (2014: 195).
There is an interesting question that has emerged in this discussion, which is why it is the case that introspection on a conscious state often returns something not easily recognizable as whatever property that state represents. For instance, when introspecting color experience, one does not find something resembling the dispositional property of a spectral reflectance profile, but rather what seems to be a stable categorical property of an object’s surface; similarly, when introspecting an experience as of a high-pitched sound, one does not find something resembling discrete sound waves arriving at the ear at a rate of thousands per second, but rather a continuous and uniform pitch; and, finally, when introspecting affective experience, one does not find something resembling the average fitness affects of an event, but rather something that—putting it roughly—feels good or bad. Why there is this disconnect between the underlying nature of what a conscious state represents, and what we find in introspection, is an interesting question indeed, one that must eventually be answered as part of any comprehensive reductive representationalist theory of consciousness.
This would be in the spirit of C&T’s teleological construal of harmfulness; see fn. 8.
One might argue that the theory offered in this article is not a competitor to Cutter and Tye’s, but rather just one way in which their abstractly specified theory could be filled out. This seems incorrect, however, since Cutter and Tye take the affective component of pain experience to (a) represent something about a “bodily disturbance,” where (b) this bodily disturbance is something occurring in the subject herself. The Fitness Effects theory, however, hypothesizes neither of these things, which is why it explains scenarios that Harm cannot. Of course, Harm could be modified so that affect is a response to something beyond the physiological/psychological effects that an event has, in which case the theory might avoid the untoward results described above. However, it seems that the logical next step would be to widen the theory so that affect is a response to the evolutionary consequences of the situation causing the affect, in which case the theory collapses into the theory of affect offered in this article.
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Kozuch, B. No Pain, No Gain (in Darwinian Fitness): A Representational Account of Affective Experience. Erkenn 85, 693–714 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0044-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0044-2