Curious Emotions

Download or read book Curious Emotions written by Ralph D. Ellis and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs. (Series A)