let me preface this by saying how much I enjoyed reading this post—it really shows that this isn’t some random idea you had but that you really thought a lot about this. As someone who’s first introduction to this kind of idea was precisely this blogpost, thanks.
question—maybe I’m simply misunderstanding you:
-you seem to assume that the cortex’s modelling of one’s own happiness is very similar to the cortex’s modelling of thinking of happiness. you might argue that it’s only the “concept of happiness”, which I would agree is present in both scenarios, but it doesn’t strike me why that in particular would be learned using this supervised mechanism.
-building on that point, I think it might be more probable that understanding another’s feelings is part of 1A—instead of simply seeing, hearing, etc. there would be something tasked with analyzing facial cues—in particular humans exhibit micro expressions (expressions that last very short periods and are almost impossible to control), something most people can’t seem to pick up on, atleast consciously. So why do we have them if other people can’t pick up on them? Maybe they can, but only subconsciously to precisely facilitate this symbol grounding for somebody else’s feelings. Then again, if you can’t consciously pick up on it, the target for the supervision will probably be terrible as well so maybe that’s not it.
(i’ll probably hammer u with more questions down the line, still trying to process all of this lol)
you seem to assume that the cortex’s modelling of one’s own happiness is very similar to the cortex’s modelling of thinking of happiness
I would say “overlaps” rather than “is similar to”. Think of it as vaguely like I-am-juggling versus you-are-juggling. Those are different thoughts, but they overlap, in that they both involve the “juggling” concept. That overlap is very necessary for e.g. recognizing that the same word “juggling” applies to both, and for transferring juggling-related ideas between myself and other people, which we are obviously very capable of doing.
you might argue that it’s only the “concept of happiness”, which I would agree is present in both scenarios, but it doesn’t strike me why that in particular would be learned using this supervised mechanism.
The chain of events would be e.g.
(1) The Thought Generator (world-model) catalogs our own interoceptive feelings into emotion-concepts like “pleasure”.
(2) The Thought Generator learns from experience that pleasure has something to do with smiling, e.g. during times where we feel pleasure and notice ourselves smile, or otherwise learn this obvious regularity in the world. This becomes a world-model (thought generator) semantic association “smile-concept” ↔ “pleasure-concept”.
(3) Often we’re paying attention to our own feelings, and then the “pleasure” emotion-concept is active if and only if our immediate interoceptive sensory inputs match “pleasure”. And these times, when we’re paying attention to our own feelings, are the only times where the pleasure Thought Assessor learning rate is nonzero. So the Thought Assessor learns that there’s a robust correlation between the “pleasure-concept” in the Thought Generator and the pleasure innate signal.
(4) Other times we’re NOT paying attention to our own immediate interoceptive sensory inputs, and then the emotion-concepts are “left hanging”, inactive regardless of what we’re feeling. But while they’re left hanging, they can INSTEAD be activated by semantic associations with other parts of our world-model. Then in such a moment, if I see someone smile, it activates smile-concept, which [via (2)] in turn weakly activates pleasure-concept, which in turn [via (3)] weakly activates the pleasure Thought Assessor. This is a candidate “transient empathetic simulation”. But remember, the learning rate of that Thought Assessor is zero whenever the emotion-concepts are “left hanging” like that. So the Thought Assessor won’t disconnect pleasure-concept.
Does that help? Sorry if I’m missing your point. …The above might be hard to follow without a diagram.
The theory that we have evolved direct responses to different facial reactions seems probably wrong to me (or at least, not the main explanation), for a couple reasons:
First, blind people seem to have normal social intuitions.
Second, I don’t think it’s plausible to simultaneously say that microexpressions immediately trigger important innate reactions, and that people are generally bad at consciously noticing microexpressions. When I think of other environmental things that immediately trigger innate reactions, I think of, like, balls flying at my face, big spiders, sudden noises, getting poked, foul smells, etc. We’re VERY good and fast at forming good conscious models of all those environmental things. So it doesn’t seem plausible to me that we could get metaphorically “poked” by microexpressions many times a day for years straight without ever developing a conscious awareness of those microexpressions.
So why do we have them if other people can’t pick up on them
For my answer, see Lisa Feldman Barrett versus Paul Ekman on facial expressions & basic emotions. We have “innate behaviors” that impact the face, such as gagging, laughing, and Duchenne-smiling. We also have voluntary control of facial muscles, which we learn to deploy strategically for social signaling. When we use voluntary control to hide the signs of “innate behaviors”, the bit of “innate behavior” that slips through the cracks is a microexpression.
You might ask: why don’t our “innate behaviors” evolve to not impact the face, so that we can hide them better? Hard to say for sure. Probably part of it is that we are only sometimes trying to hide them. Some “innate behavior” facial manifestations might also have more direct adaptive utility (cf. §4.2 of that link). Part of it is probably that the hiding is good enough, because microexpressions are actually hard to notice.
Think of it as vaguely like I-am-juggling versus you-are-juggling.
Here, I can see how they would overlap to a reasonable degree—I don’t think this easily carries over to emotions. Emotions atleast feel like this weird, distinct thing such that any statement along the lines “I’m happy” does it injustice. Therefore I can’t see it being carried over to “She’s happy”, their intersection wouldn’t be robust enough such that it won’t falsely trigger for actually unrelated things. That is, “She’s happy” ≈ “I’m happy” ≉ experiencing happiness.
Facial cues (as one example, it makes sense that there would be other things like higher-pitched voices when enjoying oneself etc) eliminate this problem because opposed to something introspective being the link, a more objective state of the mind, like “He’s sad”, will be the learned link.
this might sound like I’m being unnecessarily picky about this, but imo these associations need to be very exact, else humans would be reward-hacking all day: it’s reasonable to assume that the activations of thinking “She’s happy” are very similar to trying to convince oneself “She’s happy” internally, even ‘knowing’ the truth. But if both resulted in big feelings of internal happiness, we would have a lot more psychopaths.
regarding micro expressions specifically, it’s definitely not a hill i want to die on, it kind of just popped in my mind as I was writing about facial cues and by micro I really mean ‘micro micro’ - e.g. smiles that aren’t perfectly symmetrical for quarter of a second, something I at least can’t really pick up on; what is their evolutionary advantage if they don’t atleast offer some kind of subconscious effect on conspecifics? But yea, if you can’t consciously pick up on it, linking the two is pointless or even bad.
I read the linked post roughly, but as I read neither so far, i probably can’t relate too well to it. seems reasonable (or honestly, obvious) though that it’s a mix rather than either of those extreme statements.
these associations need to be very exact, else humans would be reward-hacking all day: it’s reasonable to assume that the activations of thinking “She’s happy” are very similar to trying to convince oneself “She’s happy” internally, even ‘knowing’ the truth. But if both resulted in big feelings of internal happiness, we would have a lot more psychopaths.
I don’t think things work that way. There are a lot of constraints on your thoughts. Copying from here:
1. Thought Generator generates a thought: The Thought Generator settles on a “thought”, out of the high-dimensional space of every thought you can possibly think at that moment. Note that this space of possibilities, while vast, is constrained by current sensory input, past sensory input, and everything else in your learned world-model. For example, if you’re sitting at a desk in Boston, it’s generally not possible for you to think that you’re scuba-diving off the coast of Madagascar. Likewise, it’s generally not possible for you to imagine a static spinning spherical octagon. But you can make a plan, or whistle a tune, or recall a memory, or reflect on the meaning of life, etc.
If I want to think that Sally is happy, but I know she’s not happy, I basically can’t, at least not directly. Indirectly, yeah sure, motivated reasoning obviously exists (I talk about how it works here), and people certainly do try to convince themselves that their friends are happy when they’re not, and sometimes (but not always) they are even successful.
I don’t think there’s (the right kind of) overlap between the thought “I wish to believe that Sally is happy” and the thought “Sally is happy”, but I can’t explain why I believe that, because it gets into gory details of brain algorithms that I don’t want to talk about publicly, sorry.
Emotions…feel like this weird, distinct thing such that any statement along the lines “I’m happy” does it injustice. Therefore I can’t see it being carried over to “She’s happy”, their intersection wouldn’t be robust enough such that it won’t falsely trigger for actually unrelated things. That is, “She’s happy” ≈ “I’m happy” ≉ experiencing happiness
I agree that emotional feelings are hard to articulate. But I don’t see how that’s relevant. Visual things are also hard to articulate, but we can learn a robust two-way association between [certain patterns in shapes and textures and motions] and [a certain specific kind of battery compartment that I’ve never tried to describe in English words]. By the same token, we can learn a robust two-way association between [certain interoceptive feelings] and [certain outward signs and contexts associated with those feelings]. And this association can get learned in one direction (interoceptive model → outward sign] from first-person experience, and later queried in the opposite direction [outward sign → interoceptive model] in a third-person context.
(Or sorry if I’m misunderstanding your point.)
what is their evolutionary advantage if they don’t atleast offer some kind of subconscious effect on conspecifics?
Again, my answer is “none”. We do lots of things that don’t have any evolutionary advantage. What’s the evolutionary advantage of getting cancer? What’s the evolutionary advantage of slipping and falling? Nothing. They’re incidental side-effects of things that evolved for other reasons.
but I can’t explain why I believe that, because it gets into gory details of brain algorithms that I don’t want to talk about publicly, sorry.
somewhat random but I think I want to learn more about this field in general—from what I can tell, you didn’t learn about it in a normal academic setting (like doing a neuroscience B.Sc.) either; any tips for good resources?
let me preface this by saying how much I enjoyed reading this post—it really shows that this isn’t some random idea you had but that you really thought a lot about this. As someone who’s first introduction to this kind of idea was precisely this blogpost, thanks.
question—maybe I’m simply misunderstanding you:
-you seem to assume that the cortex’s modelling of one’s own happiness is very similar to the cortex’s modelling of thinking of happiness. you might argue that it’s only the “concept of happiness”, which I would agree is present in both scenarios, but it doesn’t strike me why that in particular would be learned using this supervised mechanism.
-building on that point, I think it might be more probable that understanding another’s feelings is part of 1A—instead of simply seeing, hearing, etc. there would be something tasked with analyzing facial cues—in particular humans exhibit micro expressions (expressions that last very short periods and are almost impossible to control), something most people can’t seem to pick up on, atleast consciously. So why do we have them if other people can’t pick up on them? Maybe they can, but only subconsciously to precisely facilitate this symbol grounding for somebody else’s feelings. Then again, if you can’t consciously pick up on it, the target for the supervision will probably be terrible as well so maybe that’s not it.
(i’ll probably hammer u with more questions down the line, still trying to process all of this lol)
Thanks!!
I would say “overlaps” rather than “is similar to”. Think of it as vaguely like I-am-juggling versus you-are-juggling. Those are different thoughts, but they overlap, in that they both involve the “juggling” concept. That overlap is very necessary for e.g. recognizing that the same word “juggling” applies to both, and for transferring juggling-related ideas between myself and other people, which we are obviously very capable of doing.
The chain of events would be e.g.
(1) The Thought Generator (world-model) catalogs our own interoceptive feelings into emotion-concepts like “pleasure”.
(2) The Thought Generator learns from experience that pleasure has something to do with smiling, e.g. during times where we feel pleasure and notice ourselves smile, or otherwise learn this obvious regularity in the world. This becomes a world-model (thought generator) semantic association “smile-concept” ↔ “pleasure-concept”.
(3) Often we’re paying attention to our own feelings, and then the “pleasure” emotion-concept is active if and only if our immediate interoceptive sensory inputs match “pleasure”. And these times, when we’re paying attention to our own feelings, are the only times where the pleasure Thought Assessor learning rate is nonzero. So the Thought Assessor learns that there’s a robust correlation between the “pleasure-concept” in the Thought Generator and the pleasure innate signal.
(4) Other times we’re NOT paying attention to our own immediate interoceptive sensory inputs, and then the emotion-concepts are “left hanging”, inactive regardless of what we’re feeling. But while they’re left hanging, they can INSTEAD be activated by semantic associations with other parts of our world-model. Then in such a moment, if I see someone smile, it activates smile-concept, which [via (2)] in turn weakly activates pleasure-concept, which in turn [via (3)] weakly activates the pleasure Thought Assessor. This is a candidate “transient empathetic simulation”. But remember, the learning rate of that Thought Assessor is zero whenever the emotion-concepts are “left hanging” like that. So the Thought Assessor won’t disconnect pleasure-concept.
Does that help? Sorry if I’m missing your point. …The above might be hard to follow without a diagram.
The theory that we have evolved direct responses to different facial reactions seems probably wrong to me (or at least, not the main explanation), for a couple reasons:
First, blind people seem to have normal social intuitions.
Second, I don’t think it’s plausible to simultaneously say that microexpressions immediately trigger important innate reactions, and that people are generally bad at consciously noticing microexpressions. When I think of other environmental things that immediately trigger innate reactions, I think of, like, balls flying at my face, big spiders, sudden noises, getting poked, foul smells, etc. We’re VERY good and fast at forming good conscious models of all those environmental things. So it doesn’t seem plausible to me that we could get metaphorically “poked” by microexpressions many times a day for years straight without ever developing a conscious awareness of those microexpressions.
For my answer, see Lisa Feldman Barrett versus Paul Ekman on facial expressions & basic emotions. We have “innate behaviors” that impact the face, such as gagging, laughing, and Duchenne-smiling. We also have voluntary control of facial muscles, which we learn to deploy strategically for social signaling. When we use voluntary control to hide the signs of “innate behaviors”, the bit of “innate behavior” that slips through the cracks is a microexpression.
You might ask: why don’t our “innate behaviors” evolve to not impact the face, so that we can hide them better? Hard to say for sure. Probably part of it is that we are only sometimes trying to hide them. Some “innate behavior” facial manifestations might also have more direct adaptive utility (cf. §4.2 of that link). Part of it is probably that the hiding is good enough, because microexpressions are actually hard to notice.
Here, I can see how they would overlap to a reasonable degree—I don’t think this easily carries over to emotions. Emotions atleast feel like this weird, distinct thing such that any statement along the lines “I’m happy” does it injustice. Therefore I can’t see it being carried over to “She’s happy”, their intersection wouldn’t be robust enough such that it won’t falsely trigger for actually unrelated things. That is, “She’s happy” ≈ “I’m happy” ≉ experiencing happiness.
Facial cues (as one example, it makes sense that there would be other things like higher-pitched voices when enjoying oneself etc) eliminate this problem because opposed to something introspective being the link, a more objective state of the mind, like “He’s sad”, will be the learned link.
this might sound like I’m being unnecessarily picky about this, but imo these associations need to be very exact, else humans would be reward-hacking all day: it’s reasonable to assume that the activations of thinking “She’s happy” are very similar to trying to convince oneself “She’s happy” internally, even ‘knowing’ the truth. But if both resulted in big feelings of internal happiness, we would have a lot more psychopaths.
regarding micro expressions specifically, it’s definitely not a hill i want to die on, it kind of just popped in my mind as I was writing about facial cues and by micro I really mean ‘micro micro’ - e.g. smiles that aren’t perfectly symmetrical for quarter of a second, something I at least can’t really pick up on; what is their evolutionary advantage if they don’t atleast offer some kind of subconscious effect on conspecifics? But yea, if you can’t consciously pick up on it, linking the two is pointless or even bad.
I read the linked post roughly, but as I read neither so far, i probably can’t relate too well to it. seems reasonable (or honestly, obvious) though that it’s a mix rather than either of those extreme statements.
Thanks again for engaging :)
I don’t think things work that way. There are a lot of constraints on your thoughts. Copying from here:
If I want to think that Sally is happy, but I know she’s not happy, I basically can’t, at least not directly. Indirectly, yeah sure, motivated reasoning obviously exists (I talk about how it works here), and people certainly do try to convince themselves that their friends are happy when they’re not, and sometimes (but not always) they are even successful.
I don’t think there’s (the right kind of) overlap between the thought “I wish to believe that Sally is happy” and the thought “Sally is happy”, but I can’t explain why I believe that, because it gets into gory details of brain algorithms that I don’t want to talk about publicly, sorry.
I agree that emotional feelings are hard to articulate. But I don’t see how that’s relevant. Visual things are also hard to articulate, but we can learn a robust two-way association between [certain patterns in shapes and textures and motions] and [a certain specific kind of battery compartment that I’ve never tried to describe in English words]. By the same token, we can learn a robust two-way association between [certain interoceptive feelings] and [certain outward signs and contexts associated with those feelings]. And this association can get learned in one direction (interoceptive model → outward sign] from first-person experience, and later queried in the opposite direction [outward sign → interoceptive model] in a third-person context.
(Or sorry if I’m misunderstanding your point.)
Again, my answer is “none”. We do lots of things that don’t have any evolutionary advantage. What’s the evolutionary advantage of getting cancer? What’s the evolutionary advantage of slipping and falling? Nothing. They’re incidental side-effects of things that evolved for other reasons.
somewhat random but I think I want to learn more about this field in general—from what I can tell, you didn’t learn about it in a normal academic setting (like doing a neuroscience B.Sc.) either; any tips for good resources?