Esteemed colleagues, my name is Sam Vaknin, I am a professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and I am a professor of finance and a professor of psychology in the Outreach Program of SIAS-CIAPS, Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies.

My presentation today deals with the connection between the nexus, between sensor, sensory input, emotions, cognitions, and by extension morality.

And I would like to start with time travel, going back to the 70s and 80s, when Ben Bagdikian and Alvin Toffler had written about information overload.

Information overload is a phrase coined by Toffler, he also coined the phrase of a choice.

These gentlemen were very concerned with the fact that the number of advertisements, the number of television channels, the information that is presented to us by the environment is multiplying exponentially, and they thought this would create some kind of dysfunction.

This thinking is very flawed. The amount of information in the environment is irrelevant, and it’s irrelevant because the processing capacity of the brain and the filtering mechanisms embedded in the brain, they are uniform, they are constant.

And filtering relevant data from irrelevant data goes on all the time, regardless of whether one filters from 5000 advertisements or from 20 advertisements.

Our brains register 40 million bits of sensory information per second.

Most of this information is processed subconsciously or preconsciously. For every bit of information processed by our conscious brain, 5000 bits are processed by our unconscious.

So it is not a surprise that most of our processing, most of our relatedness to information, and most of the decision making, and most of the collating, most of the modeling, in short, most of our mental life, takes place exactly as Sigmund Freud has postulated 120 years ago, takes place in the unconscious.

The unconscious is where things happen. And once they happen, the unconscious informs consciousness.

95% of brain activity is unconscious, and only 5% is conscious.

And this entire thing is called selective filtering, or selective attention. There’s a variety of brain structures that take place of absorbing the environment, filtering it, navigating it, channeling it’s like packet switching in the brain. There’s the cortex, there’s the thalamus, etc, etc.

This lecture is not about brain structures.

But having said that, and having realized that we actually inhabit the Netherlands of our minds, we don’t really have any interface with what we call objective ontological reality.

We obtain information from the environment, and then we channel it and funnel it into various parts of the brain, by the way, redundantly, with multiple copies, exactly like packet switching.

And then the brain reassembles this information, but it reassembles this information subject to models, mathematical models. And these mathematical models take into account past experience, take into account the laws of nature, take into account expectations, etc, etc.

These models are not necessarily real in the objective ontological physical experimentation sense of the word.

Even when we do conduct experiments in physics, there is a huge effect, huge influence of what our brains, what our eyes choose to see and absorb in process.

The outcomes, the output crucially depends not on the input, but on how the input is organized within this gigantic computer with multiple softwares and multiple apps.

There’s a model for seeing, a model for smelling, a model for fleeing, a model for being frightened, a model for anxiety, there are models for everything, thousands, millions possibly, of models.

And these models are predicated not on the input, but they are predicated on what’s good for survival. They are evolutionary models. So we are divorced from reality.

Anywhere between 1 and 5% of what we believe to be real is actually there. 90 to 95% of what we consider reality is actually modeling in the brain, is actually totally contained, holographic kind of representation.

We are manipulating representations and symbols.

And so it’s not surprising that people, collectives and individuals disagree about so much that is psychological and mental.

I would like to read to you a passage from an introductory textbook, Psychology: an Introduction, Ninth Edition, by Charles G. Morris, University of Michigan, Prentice Hall, 1996. It’s a mind-boggling passage.

Anthropologies, says Morris, report enormous differences in the ways that different cultures categorize emotions. Some languages in fact do not have a word for emotion. Other languages differ in the number of words they have to name emotions.

While English has over 2000 words to describe emotional categories, there are only 750 such descriptive words in Taiwanese, Chinese. One tribal language has only seven words that could be translated into categories of emotion. The words used to name or to describe an emotion can influence what emotion is actually experienced.

For example, Tahitians do not have a word directly equivalent to sadness. Instead, they treat sadness as something like a physical illness.

The difference is an impact on how the emotion is experienced by Tahitians. For example, the sadness we feel over the departure of a close friend would be experienced by Tahitian as exhaustion.

Some cultures lack words for anxiety or depression or guilt. Samoans have one word encompassing love, sympathy, pity and liking altogether, which are very different emotions in our own culture.

So as you see, even language breaks down when it tries to cope and to capture our inner landscape, the psychodynamic processes that go on in our brains. And the reason is exactly what I said before, there is no strong correlation, repeat, no strong correlation between our brain’s output and objective ontological reality if it exists at all.

This presentation is divided into two parts.

In the first, I survey the landscape of the discourse regarding emotions in general and sensations in particular. And this part is familiar to any student of philosophy.

The second part contains an attempt at producing an integrative overview of the matter. I leave it to you to decide whether I succeeded or not.

Words have the power to express the speaker’s emotions, but words have also the power to evoke emotions. Whether these are the same emotions or not, this is a major dispute. Whether the listener reacts exactly as the original did, whether my sadness is your sadness, when you communicate love, whether I feel it’s the same, this is an open question. It is the conundrum of the intersubjective agreement. It is what empathy is supposed to provide, a bridge between two minds.

But minds are inaccessible in principle.

Words, therefore, possess a motive meaning together with a descriptive meaning. And the descriptive meaning plays a cognitive role in forming beliefs and understandings.

Our moral judgments and the responses deriving from these moral judgments, they have a strong emotional streak, an emotional aspect, an emotive element. Any religious person will tell you this.

Whether the emotive part predominates as the basis of appraisal is again debatable. Whether morality, in general, is founded on emotions. That’s an open question.

Can we, for example, derive a valid, internally consistent, externally efficacious moral system? Can we derive such a system from logic only, from reason only, divorced from emotion?

Interesting question.

Reason analyzes a situation. Reason prescribes alternatives for action.

But it is considered to be static, inert, not goal-oriented. One is almost tempted to say non-teleological.

The equally necessary dynamic action-inducing component is thought, for some reason, to belong to the emotional realm.

In other words, emotions drive us to do things. Emotions are energy, kind of an encapsulation of energy.

Reason is an armchair activity. It’s sitting back. It’s analytical.

Thus, the language, the words used to express moral judgment supposedly actually express the speaker’s emotions.

Though the aforementioned mechanism of emoting meaning is cardinal, and through this mechanism similar emotions are evoked in the ear, this mechanism moves other people to action. The mechanism of emoting meaning is critical, but is it exclusive? Is there any input to reason and logic? We’ll come to it a bit later.

A distinction should be, and has been drawn, between regarding moral judgment as merely a report pertaining to the subject’s emotional world and regarding moral judgment wholly as an emotive reaction.

In the first case, where it’s only a report about some internal state, the whole notion, really the phenomenon of moral disagreement, is rendered incomprehensible. How could one disagree with a report about someone else’s inner state?

But in the second case, when actually moral judgment is an emotive reaction. In the second case, moral judgment is reduced to the status of an exclamation, a non-propositional expression of emotive tension, a mental excretion.

And this observation was nicknamed the Boo-hurrah theory.

Either way, moral judgment is dubious.

If it pertains to someone’s inner state, if it’s merely a reporting of that inner state, well, it’s as valid and legitimate as any other report. It is equipotent, has equal standing, and is egalitarian.

There’s no superior morality and inferior morality. There’s only reported morality.

But if morality is emotions, if it’s another name for emotions, then it’s an expression, an exclamation, an eruption, nothing more than that.

There were those who maintained that the whole issue was the result of mislabelling.

Emotions are really what we otherwise call attitudes, say these people. We approve or we disapprove of something. And that way, we feel about that something. Prescriptivist accounts displaced emotivist analysis. And this instrumentalism did not prove more helpful, I’m sorry to say, than its purist predecessors. So we are stuck in a conundrum.

Throughout this scholarly debate, philosophers did what they do best. They had ignored reality.

Moral judgments, every child knows, are not explosive. They are not inclusive events.

There’s no shattered or scattered emotions strewn all over the battlefield.

Logic is definitely involved in moral judgment. And so are responses to already analyzed moral properties and circumstances. And to say otherwise is counterfactual.

Moreover, emotions themselves are judged morally as right or as wrong. If a moral judgment were really an emotion, we would need to stipulate the existence of a hyper emotion, meta emotion, to account for the moral judgment of our emotions.

And in all likelihood, we’ll find ourselves in an infinite regression. There’ll be meta emotion, meta meta emotion, meta meta meta emotion.

If moral judgment is a report or an exclamation, on the other hand, how are we able to distinguish it from mere rhetoric? How are we able to intelligibly account for the formation of moral standpoints by moral agents in response to an unprecedented moral challenge?

So both positions are untenable and indefensible. Moral realists criticize these largely superfluous and artificial dichotomies. Reason versus feeling, belief versus desire, emotivism and non-cognitivism versus realism. This debate has old roots.

Feeling theories such as Descartes, regarded emotions as a mental item, which requires no definition and no classification. What one could not fail to fully grasp upon having it.

In other words, if you emote, if you feel, you feel, end of story, why do we need to analyze, or capture it, or categorize it, or define it?

Descartes’ approach entails the introduction of introspection as the only way to access our feelings. Introspection not in the limited sense of awareness of one’s mental states, but in the broader sense of being able to internally ascertain mental states. It almost became material. Descartes kind of postulated the existence of a mental eye, a brain scan, at the very least, a kind of perception.

But of course, immediately others had denied its similarity to central perception. They said emotional perception is not the same as central perception. These people prefer to treat introspection as a modus of memory, recollection through retrospection as an internal way of ascertaining past mental events, remembrance of things past. And this approach relied on the impossibility of having a thought simultaneously with another thought, whose subject was the first thought.

All these lexicographic storms did not serve either to elucidate the complex issue of introspection or to solve the critical questions.

How can we be sure that what we introspect is not false? If accessible only to introspection, how do we learn to speak of emotions uniformly? How do we unreflectively assume knowledge of other people’s emotions? How come we are sometimes forced to unearth or deduce our own emotions? How is it possible to mistake our emotions, to have one emotion without actually feeling it? Are all these failures of the machinery of introspection explainable? Or do they undermine the very concept of introspection, or at the very least, the exclusivity of introspection as an access mechanism?

The proto-psychologists James and Lange have separately proposed that emotions are the experiencing of physical responses to external stimuli. Emotions are mental representations of totally corporeal, bodily reactions. Sadness, they suggested, is what we call the feeling of trying.

This was phenomenological materialism at its worst. To have full-blown emotions, not merely detached observations, one needed to experience palpable bodily symptoms. It’s like if you don’t have bodily symptoms, you don’t have feelings.

The James-Lange theory apparently did not believe that a quadriplegic, for example, can have emotions, since a quadriplegic definitely experiences no bodily sensations. You see how reductive and absurd this theory is.

Sensationalism, another form of fanatic empiricism. Sensationalism stated that all our knowledge derived from sensations, from sensa, from sense data. There is no clear answer to the question, how do these sensors, how does this sensory data, how do they get coupled with interpretations, with judgments? Why do we invariably link one set of sensory data to a specific emotion or cognition or judgment?

Kant postulated the existence of a manifold of sets, the data supplied to the mind through sensation. In the critique of pure reason, Kant claimed that these data were presented to the mind in accordance with these already preconceived forms, sensibilities like space or time.

But to experience means to unify these data, to cohere them somehow. Even Kant admitted that this is brought about by the synthetic activity of imagination as guided by understanding.

And today we call these theories of mind, theories of the world or brain models.

Not only was this a deviation from materialism, it was also not very instructive.

When Kant talks about imagination, what material is imagination made of? And how does it help us to understand anything? And when we introduce a term that is equally ill-defined, so I’m not very impressed with Kant’s work in this particular respect.

The problem was partly a problem of communication.

Emotions are qualia, qualities as they appear to our consciousness. In many respects, emotions are like sense data, which brought about the aforementioned confusion. Both sensa, sensory data, and emotions are presented to the mind. They’re not the same. The fact that they are both presented to the mind doesn’t render them one and the same.

As opposed to sensa, which are particular, qualia are universal. They are subjective qualities of our conscious experience.

It is impossible to ascertain or to analyze the subjective components of phenomena in physical objective terms. It’s impossible to communicate them.

Subjective phenomena are not communicable, and they are not understandable by all rational individuals, independent of their sensory equipment. So there’s a confusion here, confusion between subjective and objective, between qualia and data, between senses and emotions. And the subjective dimension is comprehensible only to conscious beings of a certain type with the right sensory faculties.

I think this is the source of the confusion. The belief that we have a monopoly because we are the only ones to have the right senses.

The problems of absent qualia and of inverted qualia, they’re real, they’re serious, but they’re not relevant to this more limited discussion. Absent qualia, for example, can a zombie or can a machine pass for a human being despite the fact that it has no experiences? It’s a kind of a variant of the Turing test.

Inverted qualia, what we both call red, might have been called green by you if you had my internal experience, when seeing what we call red. In other words, labeling of the same phenomena is not guaranteed by sharing the same internal experience.

So there are problems with qualia. Qualia is not a panacea, it’s not a perfect solution. But these problems are not relevant here.

They belong in the realm of private language.

Wittgenstein demonstrated that a language cannot contain elements which it would be logically impossible for anyone but its speaker to learn or to understand.

Therefore, it cannot have elements, words, whose meaning is the result of representing objects accessible only to the speaker. For instance, his emotions.

One can use a language either correctly or incorrectly. The speaker must have at its disposal a decision procedure which will allow him to decide whether his usage is correct or not.

This is not possible with a private language because it cannot be compared to anything.