Feelings may hold the key to the mind
Will psychology solve the centuries old philosophical problem of consciousness?
The philosopher Descartes was the first to suggest that people’s minds and bodies might be completely separate. He did so largely to solve both a religious and a scientific problem of the day. The religious problem was unbelief by scientifically minded people. Descartes firmly believed that his philosophy was on par with mathematical proofs and that people who needed proof of religious ideas like the immortality of the soul would see his work as such. He never did prove the immortality of the soul, only that, if mind (and therefore soul) was separate from the destructible body, then it could be indestructible. This satisfied an essentially medieval dogma about the soul that had its roots in Plato rather than the Bible, which preached resurrection, not an immortal soul, so it isn’t clear it solved anything.
The scientific reason was to address the wrong-headed science that the medieval philosophers had gotten from Aristotle. Science of the time believed that all things behaved as they did because they somehow “wanted to”. They were acting according to their nature. Descartes wanted to show that physical things like rocks and even animals could behave as they did without minds, following mathematical rules rather than some internal volition. In order to do that, he had to show that mind and body were separate.
While Newton would develop his science of bodies in motion only 50 years later, it would take another 200 years for Wilhelm Wundt and William James to create the field of psychology and finally study the entity that Descartes had forever separated from the body. It would only take another 50 years for the mind to be dismissed as irrelevant to science.
By the mid-20th century, the behaviorists had taken over psychology, and the study of the mind became the study of behavior. The mind became an artifact, a silent observer of stimulus and response. Neurological determinism was in its heyday.
Lost in that transition was the study of an essential feature of the mind but not of behavior: feeling. Feeling is distinct from emotion, which is simply the neurological and physical response to a given situation. Even insects have emotions. Whereas emotion is the vibrating string, feeling is the note: the consciousness of emotion. Thus, feeling is intimately connected to the existence of consciousness.
While emotions themselves are objective, physical responses, feelings are subjective. Each person feels their emotions differently and reacts to those feelings differently. They are what make us unique from one another.
Even now, psychology is not as concerned with feeling itself than with the causes of feelings. As Barrett, et al. describe in their paper “The Experience of Emotion”, science has done a disservice to the understanding of the emotional life:
While expedient, this scientific approach leaves out an important aspect of reality: people feel something when they experience emotion. Describing how emotion experiences are caused does not substitute for a description of what is felt, and in fact, an adequate description of what people feel is required so that scientists know what to explain in the first place.
It boggles the mind when you consider that feeling is central to our experience of consciousness. It is as if you created an entire music theory around the vibrations and pluckings of strings and blowing into tubes and banging on things and never once considered if you should worry about the notes being played.
A materialist understanding of feeling does just this. It assumes that the neurobiological and physical causes of emotions are the sum total of those feelings. For them, it is only about causes and effects. Any non-physical aspect to feelings is irrelevant or a mirage.
The most extreme are the behaviorist models of emotion. These theories are completely unconcerned with lived experience. They describe psychology as mere physical stimulus which generates a physical reaction. Emotional states are mere configurations of neural circuitry combined with chemical reactions in the body.
Others define emotions more functionally: a physical cause (a scenario such as somebody cutting you off in traffic) creates a behavioral response (swearing, shouting, angry honking). Whatever is going on between the ears, however, isn’t important. The mind-body problem becomes all body.
Philosopher John Searle pioneered Biological Naturalism (BN) as a counter to both materialist psychology and dualism. BN holds that the mind is an emergent property of the brain but not reducible to any specific physical cause. In BN what is felt is just as important as the cause and effect. In particular, the experience of feeling cannot be reduced to causes. While you can say that mental states are the result of neurocircuitry firing and chemicals coursing through the brain, you cannot point to a neurobiological phenomenon and say “that is feeling”. You can look on a functional MRI and the brain activity of someone feeling sad, but you can’t see the feeling itself. The lived experience of feeling is a phenomenon all its own. To conflate the evidence or causes of feeling with the feeling itself is a category error.
This is why feeling can only be experienced in first person. The subjective experience of feeling is a necessarily component that cannot be reduced to a third person perspective, even if the evidence of those feelings can be described in terms of facial features or other cues. The only way to understand what a feeling feels like is to ask.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner has coined insults for the two groups of consciousness researchers. The materialists are “robo-geeks”, in that they believe that complete description of consciousness is possible with a complete description of the brain and its inputs and outputs. The best known example is Harvard philosopher Daniel Dennett who has argued consciousness is an illusion. Wegner refers to those such as Searle the “bad scientists” because they hold that such a description is insufficient (and hence they are bad scientists because they regard consciousness as somehow beyond neurobiology).
Yet the scientists aren’t bad if they can understand the subjective experience of feeling through scientific means.
Traditional experimental psychology probably has a better chance of understanding consciousness and feeling than debates, thought experiments, and counter thought experiments by philosophers or even experiments by neurobiologists.
While science cannot answer why we experience consciousness, it has made some progress to explaining where feelings fit into it. Feelings are bound together with perceptions and thoughts to create a conscious experience. This creates the sense of a feeling being about something or caused by something within the conscious mind. Consider that you could have a feeling of fear but have no sense that that feeling is caused by something. It would be disconnected. In a healthy brain, this never happens. Perception creates feeling. It could be a flash of an image that connects to a memory for example. I look at the time. I connect the time to an important appointment. I see I’m late. I feel fear, as if I just saw a predator — albeit that predator is my own poor sense of time.
While perception ignites feeling, understanding what that feeling is about is an intrapersonal skill. In simple cases like being late, I recognize that my fear is connected to being late. In other cases, I may not understand why my perception ignited the feeling. I may even deliberately hide that knowledge, projecting it onto something else, etc. I may feel fear but not be able to explain why because my thoughts about those feelings are muddled by other feelings such as guilt or shame.
People can also suppress their emotional experience, pushing it into the background. The tendency to do this may be cultural as well. Japanese respondents, for example, are far less likely to describe experiencing emotions than Americans.
While biological naturalism is based in a rational approach to phenomena, an idealist approach turns it on its head. In an idealist philosophy such as Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s, the consciousness of feeling is central while the physical aspects are secondary. In other words, neurobiology is just our consciousness’s way of making sense of itself, but the essential physical causes of consciousness are forever inaccessible.
If that is so, then feeling is not simply a phenomenon of interest to us. It is the only thing we actually experience other than direct perception. Perhaps if idealist philosophy was more common in science, scientists would pay more attention to the study of feelings.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, et al. “The experience of emotion.” Annu. Rev. Psychol. 58 (2007): 373–403.