The Emotion Machine

however, we know that many functions do depend on highly localized parts of the brain. However, the arguments in this book suggests a different solution to this: we have so many different ways to accomplish most important jobs that we can tolerate the loss of some skills, because we may be able to switch to another.

In any case, each human brain has many different kinds of parts, and although we don’t yet know what all of them do, I suspect that many of them are involved with helping to suppress the effects of defects and bugs in other parts. Consequently, it will remain hard to guess why our brains evolved as they did, until we build more such systems ourselves—to learn which such bugs are most probable.

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§9-6. Why makes feelings so hard to describe?

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake
But human nature feels

—Emily Dickinson.[207]

We usually don’t find it hard to compare two similar kinds of stimuli. For example, one can say that sunlight is brighter than candle light, or that Pink lies somewhere between Red and White, or that a touch on your upper lip is somewhere between your nose and your chin. However, this says nothing about those sensations themselves. Instead, it is more like talking about the distances between some nearby towns on a map—while saying nothing at all about those towns.

Similarly, when you try to describe the feelings that come with being in love, or from suffering fear, or when seeing a pasture or a sea, you’ll soon find that you are mentioning other things that these remind you of, instead of what those feelings are. And then, perhaps, you will come to suspect that one can never really describe what anything is; one can only describe what that thing is like—or what that that thing reminds you of.

For example, if I were to ask about what Red means to you, you might say that this first makes you think of a rose, which reminds you, in turn, of being in love. Red might also remind you of blood, and make you feel some sense of dread or fear. Similarly Green might make one think about pastoral scenes and Blue might suggest the sky or the sea.

I have mentioned all this to emphasize the complexity of what can happen when a person attends to the sight of a single color or the sensation of a single touch. However, as many philosophers have complained, those remindings don’t seem to describe or explain the experience of seeing that color or feeling that touch. Indeed, some present-day philosophers regard this to be one of the hardest problems they have tried to face: Why do people experience events—instead of just simply processing them. Listen to one such philosopher:

David Chalmers: “When we visually perceive the world, we do not just process information; we have a subjective experience of color, shape, and depth. We have experiences associated with other senses (think of auditory experiences of music, or the ineffable nature of smell experiences), with bodily sensations (e.g., pains, tickles, and orgasms), with mental imagery (e.g., the colored shapes that appear when one rubs ones eyes), with emotion (the sparkle of happiness, the intensity of anger, the weight of despair), and with the stream of conscious thought.

“[That we have a sense of experiencing] is the central fact about the mind, but it is also the most mysterious. Why should a physical system, no matter how complex and well-organized, give rise to experience at all? Why is it that all this processing does not go on “in the dark”, without any subjective quality? Right now, nobody has good answers to these questions. This is the phenomenon that makes consciousness a *real* mystery.”[208]

Let me summarize what I consider to be an explanation for that ‘mystery,’ and then I’ll develop some further details.

When we see our friend Charles react to things, we cannot see the machinery that causes him to react in those ways—and so we have few alternatives to simply saying thinks like, “he is reacting to what he is experiencing.” But then, we must be using that word ‘experiencing’ as an abbreviation for what we would say if we knew what had happened inside some friend’s head—such as, “Charles must have detected some stimuli, and then made some representations of these, and then reacted to some of those by changing some of the plans he had made, etc.”

Furthermore, we ought to observe that, if your brain can begin to speak about some ‘experience’ it must already have access to some representations of some aspects of that event; otherwise, you would not remember it—or be able to claim that you have experienced it! So your very act of asserting that you have had that experience demonstrates that this ‘experience’ cannot be a simple or basic thing, but must be a complex process that is involved with the high-level networks of representations that you call your Self.

This means that the problem which Chalmers calls ‘hard’ is not really a single problem at all, because it condenses the complexity of all those many steps by squeezing them into the single word, ‘experience’ and then declares this to be a mystery.

What could make our sensations and feelings so difficult to talk about? You look at a color and see that it’s Red. Something itches your ear and you know where to scratch. That’s all there seems to be to it; you recognize that experience. No thinking seems to intervene. Indeed, quite a few philosophers have argued that the qualities of such sensations are so basic and irreducible that they will always remain inexplicable—because that is ‘just the way those things are’ and there is nothing else to an say about them.

However, here we shall will take the opposite view—that what we call sensations are extremely complex. They sometimes involve extensive cascades in which some parts of the brain are affected by signals whose origins they cannot detect—and therefore, would not be able to explain.

However, I do not mean at all to suggest that this complexity must be an obstacle to our ever being able to understand what a sensation ‘really is.’ Indeed, to recognize that a subject is complex is often the first step in the process of mastering it! This is can be seen as a principle that often applies to Psychology:

The “Easy is Hard Paradox”: The things that seem the simplest may actually be the ones that are the most complex.

In other words, if you wrongly insist that something is simple, then it will remain a mystery—because, if you are actually facing an intricate problem, then you are unlikely to find a path toward solving it, until you recognize how complex it is.

In particular, the mystery of ‘subjective experience’ won’t disappear until we recognize how it may engage many other aspects of how we think—including our highest forms of reflective thought.

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