0.2 Emotion and reason - how we decide  (Page 4/4)

So a lot of things cause and affect emotions in the brain. It is important to understand these causes (especially thoughts - since those are most under your control) if someone is to understand how your emotions influence your decisions and how your decisions influence your emotions. - (Prinz, Jesse):

• In sum, we have seen that there are several possible candidates for the constituents of emotions: cognitive states, such as appraisals, levels of arousal, emotional valence, perceptions of bodily change, action tendencies, or some combination of these.

Consciousness

Consciousness is hard to define - it arises from perception of the stimuli generated from an environment, the stimuli generated from our senses and the stimuli generated from our thoughts and feelings.

But what is the 'perception' of our own internal states and feelings? That would be a higher-order theory of consciousness. Higher order theories state that one is only conscious of a state when one reflects on that state. So if someone was constantly more reflective, then they could be considered to be more conscious in general.

Consciousness is obviously highly related to how people make decisions then. - If someone is conscious of a certain thing, or how they are conscious of that thing is going to determine how it feels for them and how they are going to make decisions from that conscious awareness.

Perceptual vs. action consciousness

Two chapters on that debate are in the book "Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind" Mclaughlin, B and Cohen, J (Eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2007. One chapter is by Jesse Prinz - "All consciousness is perceptual" and the other chapter is by Christopher Peacocke "Mental Action and Self Awareness".

Peacocke writes about action-awareness with schizophrenics:

• What the schizophrenic subject lacks in the area of conscious thought is action-awareness of the thoughts that occur to him. To enjoy action-awareness of a particular event of thinking is to be aware non-perceptually of that thinking as something one is doing oneself.

Peacocke postulates an idea about intentions:

• Is a thinker's knowledge of what he is doing really explained by his knowledge of his intentions in acting?

Prinz mentions that "there are conscious feelings associated with action". He talks about if Peacocke's view that action-awareness is different from perceptual awareness, and he talks about what Peacocke means by 'action'.

I would say that the debate is just a matter of defining the terms. The debate cannot really be solved empirically either. It is subjective to decide if something is a perception or is an action. I would say that there is a type of physical awareness of ones body and a type of mental awareness - awareness of ones own thoughts and emotions.

So that is it - there is the physical world and there is a mental world, and awareness or consciousness of both I would say is almost equally divided. That makes sense if you consider that if the physical overwhelmed the mental, physical feelings would dominate and vice versa.

People with left brain damage might have their emotions dominate (since the right brain is theorized to be more emotional). And similarly, emotional and intellectual; physical and mental are constantly in or out of balance.

Bibliography

Thagard, Paul. Cognitive Architectures. In Franish, K. and Ramsey, W. (Eds.) 'The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science'. Cambridge University Press, 2012.