Hierarchical Brain

Feeling

Feeling is a much-used and multifarious term. On this page, I expand the everyday meanings of the term to include emotions, qualia, pain, and “meaning”, because I propose that these all come about in the human brain in the same way: with symbol schemas representing feelings, connections to other symbol schemas, and the reinstatement of areas that were activated when the symbol schemas were created.

Feeling as a non-conscious stimulus evolved many millions of years ago in very simple creatures as a method of promoting survival, but it has gained extra enigmatic properties in animals with complex brains that have evolved self-awareness. The so-called hard problem of consciousness, which is the questions of why and how I experience feelings, can be explained in the context of evolution and with the consideration that “I” am my self symbol schema.

Definition

• For the purposes of this website, I take two of the three common meanings of the word feeling, and add two more because I propose that they are very similar in the way they are generated in the brain.
  • The word feeling has I think three separate meanings in general conversation:
    1. An emotion - for example, a feeling of anger, a feeling of surprise, a feeling of fear or a feeling of love.
       • An emotion is generally thought of as something associated with a change in the body, such as sweaty palms, dilated pupils or a faster pulse etc..
       • However, there is a lack of consensus on how emotions are categorised, caused and felt (see emotion below for more).
    2. A non-emotional awareness, impression or consciousness of something - for example, a “gut feeling” about a decision, a bad feeling about something, a feeling of happiness, or a conscious feeling about a meaningful object, event or situation, or about oneself.
       • These are all examples of what philosophers call qualia, the conscious feeling of something (see qualia below for more details).
       • The term qualia is controversial amongst scientists and philosophers, with some claiming that the existence of qualia cannot be explained by science; this has been called the hard problem of consciousness.
    3. The sensation associated with touch - for example, the feeling of velvet, or the feeling of sand between the toes. This meaning is not considered on this page, but is covered as part of afferent processing of incoming sense data.
  • For the purposes of ease of explanation on this website, I also include:
    • Pain because it is similar to an emotion in that it involves a change in the body, but it is also has qualia associated with it (see pain below for more details).
    • Meaning, or the connotation or interpretation of something, because it feels very similar to an ordinary feeling, and because I believe that it is brought about by the same mechanisms as qualia (see meaning below for more details).

Construction and workings

• A feeling, as I have defined it above to include emotion, pain and meaning, is represented in the brain, just as all other objects and concepts are, by a symbol schema, a degenerate network of neurons.
  • This does not mean that every feeling of “happiness”, for example, is the same, any more than every perception of a “dog” is the same.
    • There are many breeds of dog, they look very different, but all have certain common features that allow me to categorise them all as different types of dog.
    • This means that when I come across a breed of dog that I have never seen before, I still know that it is probably a dog.
    • Similarly, I can experience many different instances of happiness, but all have certain common features.
  • I have a symbol schema that represents “happiness”, just as I have one for “dog”, because I know the word, and I “know what it means”.
    • I also have symbol schemas for different instances of happiness that I may have experienced, read about, seen in films, or have been told about.
    • Each will have strong links to the original symbol schema for happiness.
    • When I say I “know what it means”, I mean that, within my brain, as I have learnt about different aspects of the word and come across different instances of it, links to other symbol schemas relating to those aspects and instances have been created and maintained (this links to meaning - see below).
  • There is both a cultural and a personal element to my concept of a feeling.
    • I have learnt the meaning of the word “happiness” from my carers and peers (and various media) as I grew up, and, like all other concepts in my brain, it is being refined all the time.
    • My personal experiences of events and situations that I have categorised as “happy” will also update my concept of the word.
    • Both these types of experiences are defined by connections between the symbol schema for “happiness” and other symbol schemas. All these symbol schemas will also have efferent connections that will later be reinstated when the symbol schema for “happiness” is reactivated.
  • Almost all my feelings are constructed in my brain solely by my past and current experiences.
    • The psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has proposed what she calls the Theory of constructed emotion that broadly says the same thing^{1, 2}, although she is dealing only with emotions, not all feelings, and she gives very few details on how the representative structures are created, maintained or used.
    • She makes clear that this theory contradicts the assumptions made by many other psychologists over many years, that there are a number of basic emotions that are universal and inherited and therefore the same in all cultures and all people³.
    • She references a large body of evidence that questions these long-standing assumptions⁴.
  • There are some basic instinctive reactions that can cause feelings or emotions that are coded in inherited DNA.
    • It has been proposed that these include a fear of heights, and fear or spiders and/or snakes. For example, it has been shown that very young babies show increased arousal when shown pictures of spiders and snakes compared to when they are shown other things⁵.
    • More recently, it has been clarified that this does not prove that an emotion (i.e. fear) is being produced in these very young babies, but only a heightened level of interest⁶. This is entirely reasonable, because an emotion cannot have been learnt at such a young age.
    • One automatic response that I am aware of has happened to me a few times, but I have never seen it reported by anyone else: if I am sitting with a computer screen quite close by, but in my peripheral vision, and the screen suddenly goes black because of a power-saving mode or screen saver cutting in, I jump and can be quite badly startled, before I have time to consciously think about what I have seen. I assume this is an example of a startle response, a natural tendency that in this case may be trying to prevent me from falling into a hole.
• Symbol schema for feelings are created and maintained, just like any other symbol schemas, by the afferent processing of incoming data.
  • The symbol schema for a feeling is activated, just like any other symbol schema, by connections from other activated symbol schemas. These connections have been formed and strengthened by previous experiences.
  • When I experience an event that makes me happy, or when I think about a past event when I was happy, the symbol schemas relating to the event will be activated and will connect, via the process of attention to my self symbol schema.
    • One or more of these will then connect to one of my symbol schemas that represents happiness, through the same process as the flow of thoughts.
    • This may also connect direct to my self symbol schema via attention briefly, causing me to be aware that I am happy.
    • Any symbol schema that is the subject of my attention, i.e. that I am conscious of, will also have efferent connections to other symbol schemas and to sensory areas that were activated when the symbol schemas were created.
    • Through the process of reinstatement, these areas will be activated and will join the existing circuits and oscillations that have formed as part of the attention process.
    • These new areas will temporarily become an integral part of my self symbol schema and will therefore cause feelings.
• Feelings that are classed as emotions have an extra dimension, they are felt in other areas of the body (see emotion below for more).
  • The efferent connections for emotions to the body will mostly use hormones, chemical signals that are released into the blood stream and have an effect on other organs.
  • Some afferent messages into the brain will use similar chemicals, which are then called neuromodulators.

What is a feeling, and why does it feel like something?

• The things we now call feelings have evolved over millions of years from simple organisms with no central nervous system to human brains that have feelings, qualia, meaning, pain and emotions.
  • In early single-celled organisms, behaviour that drove movement towards food and away from predators evolved because this behaviour prolonged life and therefore made it more likely that the organisms could reproduce.
    • At first it was simply the detection of chemicals in the environment, but this evolved gradually to additionally be chemical signals within the body of the organism.
    • For millions of years, this type of behaviour, even when it grew more complex, was hardwired, so that the response of the creature was totally automatic and predictable.
    • Others behaviours evolved to benefit the life of these simple creatures, still without any brain, but the most important imperatives remained.
    • This process is known as homeostasis, the monitoring and maintenance of the state of the body to keep it alive⁷.
    • Over time these processes become more proactive and not only concentrated on keeping the animal alive, but also making its living as comfortable as possible.
    • The methods an animal uses to proactively manage homeostasis is called allostasis.
  • The process of evolution also created centralised nervous systems, that we now call brains, and with brains came models.
    • The advantage that comes about with the prediction of requirements meant that simple models of the body and the environment started to be built in those early brains.
    • This included models of the homeostatic imperatives, i.e. things that were good or bad for the body, that would later become feelings.
    • Models of the body were extended, using exactly the same processing, with models of brain processes, and the self symbol schema eventually appeared⁸.
    • Once the self symbol schema existed, self-awareness soon followed, and the model of the self within the brain became the self.
  • Once I am my self symbol schema, then it feels like something, or means something, to be that schema.
    • The feeling comes from my self-awareness. It feels like something because I aware of myself, my self symbol schema models itself.
    • What it feels like to be a schema is more like meaning than feeling, so I could equally well say that it means something to be a schema.
    • If it didn’t feel like anything, then I wouldn’t have self-awareness and wouldn’t have consciousness, so I wouldn’t know anything, and couldn’t report on it.
    • It doesn’t feel like anything when I am in a deep sleep or under anaesthetic, but that is when my self, in effect, does not exist, because I have no self-awareness.
    • Just as all feelings and emotions about an external thing come from previous encounters with that thing, so all feelings and emotions about myself come from previous “encounters” with myself.
    • Homeostatic imperatives then have feelings attached to them and feel like something.
  • How does it feel like something when I perceive something?
    • When a symbol schema for an object is connected to my self symbol schema through attention, it means that, temporarily, a change is made to my self symbol schema; it has become extended by the addition of a new symbol schema.
    • Self-awareness means that I am then aware that something has changed, and I gain a new awareness of a new thing being attached to my self.
    • It feels as though I have direct access, almost a possession, of the thing I am perceiving (it was said many years ago that attention on something feels like taking possession of that thing⁹).
  • Take the example of perceiving a frisbee.
    • My feelings about a frisbee (the symbol schema for a frisbee) are generated solely from my previous encounters with it, which encompasses meaning relating to other concepts and symbols, and emotional feelings relating to emotional states that I had at those times.
    • Drawing a parallel with the self symbol schema, my feelings about myself are generated solely from previous encounters with myself, which obviously are much more frequent, wide-ranging and complex than my encounters with a frisbee.
    • But if I am that schema, then it is me that feels these feelings; I have self-awareness, therefore my self is aware that it is my self that has these feelings.
• Feeling, including emotion, is the same as what psychologists call affect, and this is more precisely defined as having three dimensions, each of which has been investigated separately:
  • Valence - the subjective judgement of the whether a feeling is good/positive or bad/negative.
  • Strength - the motivational intensity of a feeling.
  • Arousal - the level of awakeness or alertness, or level of consciousness, which affects whether or how much reaction is made to a feeling.
  All of these, separately or together in any combination, can affect the reaction that is made to a feeling.

Emotion

• Emotion is generally thought of as a conscious feeling that involves a change to the state of the body, such as sweaty palms, a dry mouth, “butterflies in the stomach”, dilated pupils, rapid breathing, and so on.
  • In everyday language, the word “emotion” is used in a wider sense to mean the opposite of logical thought, as though someone who is emotional is not in full control of their actions. This is obviously not completely true, but I think reflects how strong a motivator an emotion can be.
• A specific emotion is represented in the brain by a specific symbol schema and therefore, like any symbol schema, consists of a network of multiple neurons that have been added at different times as a result of different experiences.
• Emotions are different from ordinary feelings in a number of ways.
  • The reinstatement of a symbol schema for an emotion will include bodily changes, perhaps initiated by hormones rather than neuronal connections. When this emotion is recalled, either because of an external trigger or because of internal memory, the memory of the physical manifestation of that emotion may be reinstated. So, for example, physical manifestations of fear will involve an increased heart rate, a dry mouth due to decreased salivation, etc.
  • The symbol schema for a chair can be activated by me thinking about a chair because of some internal linkage from another symbol schema, or it can also be activated by me seeing a chair. But in either case it is a symbol of an external thing. However, a symbol schema activated by a message from inside the body, such as hunger, feels like it is part of me that is being activated.
  • There is also a difference with conscious access - because of the nature of efferent connections to internal senses, any conscious access via attention is vague at best. If I am not hungry, or in pain, I have a feeling of what it is like to be hungry or in pain, but I can’t recall it in exactly the same way as a memory of an external concept or event.
  • It is often felt that there is non-conscious processing involved in emotions, but not with other feelings.
    • If I have a fear of snakes, the sight of something that might be a snake can make me fearful well before I consciously register it.
    • But this is simply saying that the physical manifestations of fear can happen before attention can be triggered.
    • For ordinary feelings, there are no effects on the body, so we do not tend to notice any pre-conscious effects, but they could be there just the same.

Pain

• Pain is very much like an emotion in that it involves a change in the body.
  • Pain triggers a symbol schema in the brain, but like an emotion, there can be other changes in the body that take place before the symbol schema is connected to the self symbol schema via the process of attention, in other words, before it becomes conscious.
    • So, for example, a withdrawal of the offending body part or a flinch, can take place before I even know that I have hurt myself.
  • Evidence points to pain being a symbol schema, a representation in the brain, because there are circumstances where it is not consciously accessed.
    • Perhaps because it is a slight pain, we can be distracted with some other interesting thing and forget about it for a time, in other words, the process of attention causes other things to take priority for a time. However, pain is a stimulus that does not go away quickly, so it will probably come back.
    • Also, other emotions such as fear can override a pain, such as on the battlefield.
  • It is felt in the self symbol schema as an involuntary extra dimension of the symbol schema, and is felt as if it is at the site of an injury, it is not felt in the brain.
    • This is because, just like all other symbol schemas, it is part of the model of my world, in this case part of the model of my body, so the feeling I have about it is in its place in the model.

Qualia

• Qualia is a philosophical term for the conscious feeling of something, whether that something is a perception, a memory or a pain.
  • A huge amount has been written about them by philosophers (see the Wikipedia page on qualia, for example), much of which makes little progress in explaining them.
  • My view is that they are simply the feelings associated with a perception, memory, or pain that come about because of reinstated connections.
  • In other words, they are entirely dependent on past experience, as is all perception.
  • Qualia only come about when a perception, memory or pain is conscious, in other words is connected to the self symbol schema.
  • A number of quintessential examples are given such as the taste of a red wine, the sight of a sunset, or what it is like to be a bat, but if you have never experienced these things, then you will never have any qualia associated with them.

Meaning

• Meaning is very closely related to feelings and qualia - I understand the meaning of something only in relation to other things that the something is connected to, whether it is a perception, a memory or a pain.
  • Meaning is only manifested when a perception becomes conscious, although you could argue that it exists at other times.
  • Meaning can only come from a perception via modality-specific (sense specific) data.
    • I can’t have feelings about an abstract concept such as “evil” unless it is associated with other more concrete concepts that have connections to data that came from the senses that represents those closely-connected concepts.

Conclusions

• In the conclusion section of the web page that I have called I am my self symbol schema I provide a six-point logical argument for why consciousness can only happen in a self symbol schema.
  • A similar argument can apply to feelings, where the word incorporates all the other aspects described on this page, qualia, emotions, pain and meaning:
    1. Feelings require self-awareness - I do not have any feelings if I am asleep or under anaesthetic, and I do not have any feelings that I am not self-aware of.
    2. Self-awareness is a thing being aware of itself - this is self-evident.
    3. Awareness of a thing requires a schema, or model, of the thing being perceived - this is proved by features of perception and so-called illusions.
    4. The self is no different from any other thing that is being perceived, so is also represented by a schema - this is perhaps contentious, but illusions of cognoception show that it is true.
    5. Therefore the self is a schema and self-awareness is the self schema being aware of itself.
    6. The conclusion is that only a self schema can be self-aware and therefore only a self schema can have feelings.
  • The succinct version of this argument says: Feelings require self-awareness; self-awareness can only happen within a model of the self; therefore feelings can only happen within a model of the self.
• Although it is difficult to describe and understand how or why feelings come about in an entity that exists as a schema or model, I suggest that this is easier than understanding how or why feelings could exist in a brain as a whole.

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References For information on references, see structure of this website - references

1. ^ How emotions are made - The secret life of the brain - Lisa Feldman Barrett 2017 Pan Books (UK) or see GoogleScholar.
   As the title suggests, this whole book is about the proposal that emotions are constructed in the brain, as opposed to there being standard categories of emotions that are found in every human, in every culture.
   Page 31: “In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.”
   
2. ^ The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization - Barrett 2017
   doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw154 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Pages 12-13, under the heading “The theory of constructed emotion”: “A brain can be thought of as running an internal model that controls central pattern generators in the service of allostasis .... An internal model runs on past experiences, implemented as concepts. ... The brain continually constructs concepts and creates categories to identify what the sensory inputs are, infers a causal explanation for what caused them, and drives action plans for what to do about them. When the internal model creates an emotion concept, the eventual categorization results in an instance of emotion.”
   
3. ^ Ibid. The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization
   Abstract, first page: “The science of emotion has been using folk psychology categories derived from philosophy to search for the brain basis of emotion. The last two decades of neuroscience research have brought us to the brink of a paradigm shift in understanding the workings of the brain, however, setting the stage to revolutionize our understanding of what emotions are and how they work.”
   
4. ^ Ibid. The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization
   Page 4 has a full-page list of “Examples of neuroscience evidence that disconfirm the classical view of emotion” that lists 30 references to other papers.
5. ^ Itsy Bitsy Spider...: Infants React with Increased Arousal to Spiders and Snakes - Hoehl, Hellmer, Johansson and Gredeback 2017
   doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01710 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 7, Conclusion: “We provide evidence that infants at 6 months of age respond with increased arousal, as indicated by pupillary dilation, to spiders and snakes compared with flowers and fish. We suggest that stimuli representing an ancestral threat to humans induce a stress response in young infants. These results speak to the existence of an evolved mechanism that prepares humans to acquire specific fears of ancestral threats.”
6. ^ Fear in infancy: Lessons from snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers - LoBue, Adolph 2019
   doi: 10.1037/dev0000675 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   Page 3, bottom of page: “Based on our reevaluation of infants’ behaviors towards snakes/spiders, heights, and strangers, we conclude that complex, situation-specific, and variable behaviors are far more adaptive than the traditional fear account might suggest, and carry important lessons for how researchers should approach the study of infant fear in future work.”
7. ^ The strange order of things: Life, feeling and the making of cultures - Antonio Damasio Pantheon Books USA 2018
   Page 25, under the heading “Homeostasis““, 2nd paragraph: “homeostasis... ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing...”
8. ^ Ibid. The strange order of things: Life, feeling and the making of cultures
   Page 75, under the heading “The Big Conquest”: “The ability to generate images opened the way for organisms to represent the world around them... and, just as important, it allowed organisms to represent the world inside each of them.”[Damasio uses the word “images” here to mean representative structures in the brain, not just of visual images but of any concept - see symbol schema - Damasio’s concepts.]
9. ^ The Principles of Psychology - William James 1890
   viewable here, downloadable here: Volume I and Volume II or see GoogleScholar.
   Chapter 11 on Attention, third paragraph: “Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

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