Emotional Consciousness
Something important is missing so far in all this talk of interacting brain areas. People don't just have
emotions, they feel emotions, and the title of this chapter proposed that brains actually feel emotions.
Every human knows what it is like to feel happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgusted, surprised, and so on.
Where is the feeling in the EMOCON model in figure 5.2? The name “EMOCON” is supposed to
indicate that it is a model of emotional consciousness, but this would be bogus if it did not tell us
something about conscious experience, about what it is like to feel happy or sad. I suggested in
chapter 3 that finding mechanisms for consciousness is the major barrier to acceptance of the
inference to the best explanation that minds are brains. I will not offer a full theory of consciousness
in this book, but I will sketch how the EMOCON model suggests a mechanistic explanation of
emotional consciousness. My goal is not just to describe aspects of emotional experiences, but to
sketch how the interactions of neural populations can generate and indeed constitute such experiences.
Think of a recent time when you were happy, perhaps because you enjoyed the convent joke at the
start of this chapter, or more intensely because you got an invitation to visit a good friend in an
exciting city. Such experiences are not raw wholes incapable of further interpretation; they have
identifiable aspects. First, your happiness was not free-floating, but was connected with cognitive
representations of the world, such as your friend and the city. You were happy that you were invited
to make the visit. Second, conscious emotional experiences have a positive or negative character, in
this case not just a feeling, but a good feeling. Third, conscious emotional experiences have an
intensity, in this case a high degree in contrast to other situations that may make you only a little
happy. Fourth, this emotional experience is differentiated from other emotions, including negative
ones such as sadness and more or less intense versions of happiness. Fifth, emotional experiences
begin and end: you start feeling happy as you first get the invitation and stop feeling happy when you
get distracted by some annoying work task that must be completed. It would be pointless to try to give
a mechanistic explanation of anything so vague as “what it feels like” to be happy, but the EMOCON
model has much to say about the five aspects of conscious experience just described.
Concerning the first aspect, I have already shown how emotions such as happiness and cognitive
representations such as visiting a friend can be integrated, through the coordinated activity of neural
populations in different brain areas. Hence the EMOCON model shows how emotional experiences
are not just feelings but feelings about things. Second, the positive and negative character of
emotional experience has been explained by the role of particular brain areas such as the nucleus
accumbens and the amygdala, well known to be associated with feeling good or bad. The reason that
it feels good to be happy is neural, related to activity in particular brain regions associated with both
bodily perceptions and cognitive appraisals.
Third, the varying intensity of emotional experience seen in greater and lesser bouts of happiness
can naturally be explained in terms of degree of activity in the relevant neural populations. There is
research showing that being more hateful involves more activity in areas such as the insula, and that
anticipation of greater rewards correlates with increased activity in the nucleus accumbens. It is
possible to test the hypothesis that increased degree of intensity of an emotional experience correlates
with increased rapidity of neural firing in the relevant brain areas as measured by brain scanners that
detect increased blood flow. For example, people's preference for Coke over Pepsi correlates with
increased activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The link between preference and
activation could be shown to be more than correlational, if some technique like electrostimulation of
neurons or transcranial magnetic stimulation could be used to send varying degrees of excitation or
inhibition to the appropriate brain areas.
Fourth, unlike the narrow account of emotions as bodily perceptions, my combined model of
emotions can explain how emotional experience can be so finely differentiated. It is not just that
emotions come with many different combinations of positive/negative valuations and degrees of
intensity, but also that they involve an unlimited number of different cognitive appraisals with respect
to multiple goals. There is a vast number of possible brain states with different combinations of firing
patterns of billions of neurons in brain areas that cover external sensing, internal sensing, valuing, and
assessing of coherence with goals. So it is not surprising that we have such a variety of emotional
experiences. Mixed emotions, such as a parent's feeling both proud and worried when a child leaves
home, are easily explained by the complexity of neural constraint satisfaction involving
representations of multiple goals.
Fifth, changes in emotional experience are naturally explained by the sensitivity of the EMOCON
model to perceptual experience, which frequently changes and thereby provides new inputs to the
whole process depicted in figure 5.2. The starting and stopping of emotional experiences can also be
prompted by internal cognitive processes, as when you suddenly remember an overdue project and
worry about it. In this case, activity in the prefrontal cortex initiates the bodily reactions and
cognitive appraisals that generate emotional experience.
Because the EMOCON model can explain all these characteristics of emotional experience, it
becomes plausible to identify emotional feelings with brain states. Your feeling happy is a complex
pattern of neural processing of the sort sketched in figure 5.2. Emotions are patterns of activity in
multiple brain areas that integrate cognitive appraisal and bodily perception, producing conscious
experiences and guiding action. Some philosophers will respond that they just can't imagine how
feelings could be brain processes, and that they can easily imagine having brains exactly like ours
without having any feelings. But I argued in chapter 2 that such capacities and incapacities for
understanding the mind as brain should not be taken seriously, because what we manage to conceive
is an indicator not of reality, but only of our current limited understanding of it. I predict that progress
in neuroscience will continue to make it easier for us to think of mind as brain, and we will only get
better at imagining how brains can feel emotions.
It should now be clear how religious faith can be a kind of emotional consciousness. When people
maintain that their faith assures them of the existence and goodness of God, their certainty derives
from an intense feeling based on emotional coherence of those beliefs with their personal goals, not
from an inference to the best explanation based on evidence. Feelings that come from the heart or
from the gut may be compelling because they strongly combine cognitive appraisal of goal relevance
with bodily perceptions, both of which are performed unconsciously and come to consciousness only
as part of the integrated process tied to working memory displayed in the EMOCON model. But
emotional consciousness justifies belief only when it is based on full evaluation of alternative
hypotheses with respect to all the relevant evidence. Spiritual experiences and philosophical
intuitions are products of interacting brain processes, not sources of special evidence about the nature
of mind and reality.
My concern in this chapter has been only with emotion, but mechanistic explanations are starting to
emerge for other kinds of consciousness, especially visual experience. In contrast, dualist
explanations of consciousness as resulting from ineffable spiritual powers remain mysterious. Hence
phenomena of consciousness are not barriers to the conclusion that minds are brains. There are, of
course, many questions that remain to be answered, such as why and how consciousness evolved.
It is easy to appreciate the evolutionary advantages that animals gain from the evaluative aspects of
emotions, guiding organisms toward more effective strategies of surviving and reproducing. But why
should feeling be part of the process? One possibility is that emotional and other kinds of
consciousness are just by-products of the organizational complexity of the brain, without any special
evolutionary contribution. But it is also possible that brains evolved to have feelings as complex
representations because of their contribution to the effectiveness of both individuals and groups. A
feeling such as happiness or fear can provide a concise summary of the complex unconscious
evaluation by constraint satisfaction of the advantages and dangers of a situation. Feelings provide
succinct information about anticipated benefits and risks, and thereby foster quick and effective
action. Other likely advantages of emotional consciousness are social, providing a more direct way
of understanding the emotional states of others (see the discussion of empathy in chapter 9). Perhaps
we will be in a better position to figure out the evolutionary significance of emotional consciousness
when more is known about the neural mechanisms that support it.