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December 23, 2023 - January 5, 2024
it appears that not all biological processes which culminate in a response selection belong in the scope of reasoning and deciding as outlined above.
Reasoning and Deciding in a Personal and Social Space
Might there be non-imagistic scenarios? Verbal comes to mind. What else might there be? Does this generate the possibility of a rationalsm the author is contradicting?
set at diverse imaginary epochs, and burdened with the need to compare results of a different nature which somehow must be translated into a common currency
the cool strategy advocated by Kant, among others, has far more to do with the way patients with prefrontal damage go about deciding than with how normals usually operate.
THE SOMATIC-MARKER HYPOTHESIS
What does the somatic marker achieve?
somatic markers are a special instance of feelings generated from secondary emotions. Those emotions and feelings have been connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios.
my idea is that somatic markers (or something like them) assist the process of sifting through such a wealth of detail—in effect, reduce the need for sifting because they provide an automated detection of the scenario components which are more likely to be relevant. The partnership between so-called cognitive processes and processes usually called “emotional” should be apparent.
I wonder if any distinction between his dispositional representations is important here
Truth does not pertain to the physiological causes that make us believe, feel, or intend in a particular way. Beliefs, feelings, and intentions are indeed the result of a number of factors rooted in our organisms and in the culture in which we have been immersed, even if such factors may be remote and we may not be aware of them.
Under certain circumstances, however, freedom from biological and cultural constraints can also be a hallmark of madness and can nourish the ideas and acts of the insane.
most somatic markers we use for rational decision-making probably were created in our brains during the process of education and socialization, by connecting specific classes of stimuli with specific classes of somatic state. In other words, they are based on the process of secondary emotions.
Somatic markers are thus acquired by experience, under the control of an internal preference system and under the influence of an external set of circumstances which include not only entities and events with which the organism must interact, but also social conventions and ethical rules. The neural basis for the internal preference system consists of mostly innate regulatory dispositions, posed to ensure survival of the organism. Achieving survival coincides with the ultimate reduction of unpleasant body states and the attaining of homeostatic ones, i.e., functionally balanced biological
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The interaction between an internal preference system and sets of external circumstances extends the repertory of stimuli that will become automatically marked.
When the choice of option X, which leads to bad outcome Y,
The prefrontal cortices thus contain some of the few brain regions to be privy to signals about virtually any activity taking place in our beings’ mind or body at any given time.7 (The prefrontal cortices are not the only eavesdropping posts; another is the entorhinal cortex, the gateway to the hippocampus.)
the prefrontal cortices receive signals from several bio-regulatory sectors of the human brain. These include the neurotransmitter nuclei in the brain stem (for instance, those which distribute dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin), and in the basal forebrain (those which distribute acetylcholine), as well as the amygdala, the anterior cingulate, and the hypothalmus.
prefrontal networks establish dispositional representations for certain combinations of things and events, in one’s individual experience, according to the personal relevance of those things and events.
contingency applies: it is your own thing, related to your own experience, relative to events that vary with the individual.
Convergence zones located in the prefrontal cortices are thus the repository of dispositional representations for the appropriately categorized and unique contingencies of our life experience.
It is likely that different domains of knowledge are categorized in different prefrontal sectors.
“As if” mechanisms
Evolution is not the Great Chain of Being, and it has obviously taken many separate roads, one of which led to us. But I believe much can be gained by studying how simpler organisms perform such seemingly complicated tasks with modest neural means.
INTUITION
To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations and in making those which are useful and which are only a small minority. Invention is discernment, choice.
Among chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart. Not that I mean as sufficing for invention the bringing together of objects as disparate as possible; most combinations so formed would be entirely sterile. But certain among them, very rare, are the most fruitful of all.
This proposal, it should be noted, is intended cautiously for the personal and social domain for which I have supporting evidence, although Poincaré’s insight suggests that the proposal might be extended to other domains.
It is thus appropriate at this point to say a word about reasoning outside the personal and social realm.
Evolution is thrifty and tinkering. It has had available, in the brains of numerous species, decision-making mechanisms that are body-based and survival-oriented, and those mechanisms have proven successful in a variety of ecological niches. As the environmental contingencies increased and as new decision strategies evolved, it would have made economical sense if the brain structures required to support such new strategies would retain a functional link to their forerunners. Their purpose is the same, survival,
natural selection tends to work precisely this way, by conserving something that works, by selecting other devices which can cope with greater complexity, rarely evolving entirely new mechanisms from scratch.
From an evolutionary perspective,
THE HELP OF EMOTION, FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE
simply, our reasoning strategies are defective
uncertainty and complexity of personal and social problems.
a body-based mechanism is needed to assist “cool” reason, it is also true that some of those body-based signals can impair the quality of reasoning.
failures of rationality
“availability error,”
the body-based “negative” influence, although out of step with actual statistics, is nonetheless survival-oriented:
Biological drives
automated somatic-marker mechanisms can be pernicious to our behavior, and how, under some circumstances, their absence can be an advantage.
an automated somatic-marker device would have helped us detect the useless and indulgent nature of the exercise.
Ultimately, the question raised here concerns the type and amount of somatic marking applied to different frames of the problem being solved.
Too much feeling at the smaller frames or too little at the larger frame can have disastrous consequences.
Von Karajan
BESIDE AND BEYOND SOMATIC MARKERS
necessity does not make for sufficiency.
logical competence does come into play beyond somatic markers. Moreover, several processes must precede, co-occur with, or immediately follow somatic markers, to permit their operation.
What dominates the mind landscape once you are faced with a decision is the rich, broad display of knowledge about the situation that is being generated by its consideration. Images corresponding to myriad options for action and myriad possible outcomes are activated and keep being brought into focus. The language counterpart of those entities and scenes, the words and sentences that narrate what your mind sees and hears, is there too, vying for the spotlight.
“generator of diversity”
categorization allows us to discover rapidly whether a given option or outcome is likely to be advantageous, or how diverse contingencies can modify the degree of advantage.
