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Commentary
Michelle Maiese
Emmanuel College, MA, USA
Maiese, Michelle. 2023. “‘Semantic Dualism’ and the Role of the Body in Emotional Experience.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 5, no. 1: 11-17. https://doi.org/10.33497/2023.summer.2.
Abstract: Mun’s proposed taxonomy of theories of emotions highlights important commonalities and differences among a wide range of philosophical and psychological accounts and provides an astute mapping of the theoretical landscape. My critical comments focus primarily on the metaphysical account of the mind-body relation that Mun presents, and the implications of this “semantic dualist” account for three of the book’s central topics: (1) conscious experience, (2) underived intentionality, and (3) what it means to provide an embodied cognitive theory of emotions.
Keywords: cognitive theory of emotion; embodiment; enactivism; hard problem; intentionality of emotions; semantic dualism
Mun’s (2021) proposed taxonomy of theories of emotions highlights important commonalities and differences among a wide range of philosophical and psychological accounts and provides an astute mapping of the theoretical landscape. My critical comments focus primarily on the metaphysical account of the mind-body relation that Mun presents, and the implications of this “semantic dualist” account for three of the book’s central topics: (1) conscious experience, (2) underived intentionality, and (3) what it means to provide an embodied cognitive theory of emotions. Most notably, Mun’s commitment to the thesis that consciousness is identical to brain states seems to be in tension with the claim that the body beyond the brain plays a constitutive role in emotional experience and intentionality.
SEMANTIC DUALISM, TYPE IDENTITY, AND THE HARD PROBLEM
Mun’s proposed metaphysical account appears in chapter 5, where she characterizes semantic dualism as a type-identity theory about the relationship between mental states and neurophysiological states. This account takes a position between strong and weak reductivism: like strong reductivism, semantic dualism holds that consciousness can be broken down into its component parts; but like weak reductivism, it holds that on its own,
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the sum of the component parts cannot provide a complete explanation of consciousness. In addition to the sum of the component parts, what is needed for a complete explanation is the integrated information of these component parts. But even if consciousness is not explanatorily or epistemically reducible to neurophysiological states, type-identity theory entails that it must nonetheless be ontologically or metaphysically reducible (Hanna and Maiese 2009), and therefore “nothing but” these neurophysiological states. Indeed, Mun is careful to note that semantic dualism is not a kind of property dualism since it holds that mental features are identical to physical features. That is, like color, mass, and height, consciousness is a material property, and is ontologically reducible to, and thus nothing over and above, a thing’s basic material properties.
So, in what sense is this a dualist account? According to Mun, mentalistic languages about the mind and physicalist languages about the body and brain are distinct kinds of languages for speaking about living substances. However, she maintains that semantic dualism should not be identified as a kind of dual aspect theory or neutral monism since semantic dualism says that the only kinds of substance and properties that exist are material substances and properties. Mun rightly notes that, like other reductive accounts, semantic dualism faces the challenge of addressing (a) how mental phenomena and their associated material phenomena can be related in terms of an identity statement, and (b) why these material phenomena give rise to conscious experience.
Regarding (a), Mun maintains that these identity statements assert both a constitutive and a definitional relation; mental states are identical to material processes, some of which are distributed throughout the body rather than being wholly localized in the brain. However, when Mun goes on to suggest that the neural correlates of conscious experience can be identified, this makes it seem as if she is committed to a neurocentric, brainbound (Clark 2008) conception of experience. After all, if it is possible to provide a physical definition of what it means for something to be a ‘conscious experience’ in terms of neural correlates, then why think that bio-physio-social causes and effects play a constitutive role? If a set of physically necessary and sufficient neural conditions can be identified for a conscious experience, then it appears that the rest of the body matters only causally or instrumentally, as a source of inputs and outputs for brain activity (Shapiro 2005).
Regarding (b), it is unclear how this account solves the “hard problem,” which concerns how and why this brain activity is accompanied by conscious experience. What Chalmers deems “easy” problems have to do with how we discriminate stimuli, report information, and monitor internal mental states, all of which can be cashed out in functionalist, information processing terms. What Chalmers calls the “hard problem,” in contrast, takes us beyond information processing and functions:
How and why do physical processes give rise to experience? Why do not these processes take place ‘in the dark’, without any accompanying state of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness. (Chalmers 2003)
Since Mun rejects panpsychism, she needs to explain why brain activity involves an experiential, what-it’s-like quality whereas other physical states and processes in the world do not.
To address this challenge, Mun maintains that there is something special about material things that are alive. She writes: “A simple naturalistic answer to the question of why some material processes are also conscious processes, especially when not all material processes are, is that this is how conscious beings have evolved” (Mun 2021, 131). But how does the fact that beings like us have evolved explain why some material processes are also conscious/experiential, or why they involve a first-person perspective? Mun proposes that conscious experiences allow us to know and that knowing is more conducive to survival. By virtue of our conscious experiences, “we not only bring forth but also affirm or deny the existence of a very significant kind of value in the world—biographically subjective value—which contributes to effective decision-making” (131). Non-conscious,
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non-emotional beings would not have such information, except perhaps derivatively. Here Mun asserts that although a robot might act as if it had conscious experiences, including conscious emotional experiences, it would not genuinely have such experiences. But what does the robot lack, and why must a material substance be alive in order to exhibit conscious phenomenon with experiential qualitative character?
Remember that according to semantic dualism, conscious experiences are type identical to neural correlates. At the end of the day, it’s this brain activity that has evolved and has contributed to survival. Even if conscious experience is not explanatorily superfluous, it has no causal power aside from the neural correlates to which it is identical. At moments, Mun seems to resist this sort of reductionism. She maintains that conscious experiences are not simply the total sum of the necessary and sufficient material conditions that constitute them; rather, the integrated sum total of the material processes that constitute conscious experiences constitute information that is above and beyond the simple sum of its parts. Although this may sound like a form of emergence, it is crucial to note that only a very weak form of emergence—some sort of epistemic or explanatory emergence (O’Connor 1994)—is compatible with semantic dualism. This sort of emergence merely captures our scientific inability to predict certain kinds of physical properties. For example, our scientific knowledge of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms alone will not enable us to predict their chemical bonding as H2O. Nonetheless, the property of being di-hydrogen oxide is literally identical with the relational interaction of hydrogen and oxygen, and not ontologically emergent from it (Hanna and Maiese 2009) or anything over and above it. Likewise, conscious experiences are type-identical to neurophysiological states and have no causal power aside from these material conditions. It remains unclear why living material things instantiate conscious experience whereas other material things do not.
UNDERIVED INTENTIONALITY,
THE ROLE OF THE LIVING BODY, AND ENACTIVISM
To account for both underived intentionality and emotional intentionality, Mun again points to the special status of living organisms. In chapter 6, she maintains that the aboutness involved in underived intentionality is naturally integrated in virtue of the natural organization of the entity’s functional material. The information processing carried out by inert materials is “gappy” in a way that makes it different from the information processing carried out by the materials of living organisms. It is only the information processing carried out by my entire living being that allows for underived intentionality and “generates” all of my conscious, unconscious, subconscious, and non-conscious experiences. And in chapter 7, Mun maintains that emotions involve a relation between some aspect of the world and a subject’s well-being; arguably it is only entities that are alive that are concerned about their well-being. It seems clear that Mun wishes to draw a connection between being alive and exhibiting emotional intentionality, and to highlight some sort of linkage between mind and life. However, her metaphysical commitments make this more difficult to explain. In particular, Mun’s reductionist account of the mind-body relation, and her description of living organisms in mechanistic, information processing terms, seem to be in tension with the intuition that something new and special (e.g., conscious experience and underived intentionality) emerges only in living things. Why is the information processing carried out by inert materials (such as those of a very sophisticated robot) necessarily “gappy” or representationally limited? It is unclear why natural integration or organization “generates” experience and underived intentionality, whereas artificial integration does not.
Note that other existing accounts of the mind, such as enactivism, (Thompson 2007; Weber and Varela 2002) seem better positioned to make sense of the inseparability of mind and life and the connection between being alive and exhibiting emotional experience and intentionality. Enactivist accounts commonly characterize living animals as non-mechanistic, non-linear, dynamic systems and holds that both conscious experience and intentionality emerge out of the purposiveness and sensorimotor engagement of self-organizing, self-regulating,
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adaptive living systems. Instead of looking to neural correlates or “to the intrinsic properties of neural activity in order to explain experience, this enactivist approach looks to the dynamic sensorimotor relations among neural activity, the body, and the world” (Di Paolo 2005, 414). It says that the conscious experiences of the subjectively lived body are fully bound up with the living body (Hanna and Thompson 2003) and its embodied engagement with its surroundings. Likewise, intentionality emerges out of “organismic processes of self-regulation aimed at sustaining and enhancing adaptive autonomy in the face of perturbing environmental events” (Thompson and Stapleton 2009, 27); and affective experiences can be understood as “emergent features of the whole complex system (animal or person) as it enacts an emotional interpretation” (Colombetti and Thompson 2008, 59).
According to this enactivist view, nature contains dynamic physical wholes or systems whose proper parts relationally interact in a way that yields novel global properties of these systems. These global features not only cannot be predicted by us from scientific knowledge of the proper parts alone, but also have causal powers over and above the sum of these component parts. In my view, enactivism moves us away from neuroreductionism, and by linking together the lived body and the living body, it also moves us away from the kinds of Cartesian assumptions that Mun says she wants to resist. In addition, it offers a way to make sense of why conscious experiences and underived intentionality are features of living systems, but not non-living ones. However, it is less clear how to make sense of the connection between life and mind given Mun’s commitment to reductionism and type identity, her claim that the living body can be described mechanistically, and her belief that underived intentionality is simply a matter of information processing.
SEMANTIC DUALISM AND WHAT IT MEANS TO PROVIDE AN
EMBODIED COGNITIVE ACCOUNT OF EMOTION
These concerns lead directly to questions about the embodied cognitive account of emotion that Mun presents in chapters 9 and 10. The backdrop for this discussion appears in chapter 1, when Mun maintains that dualism was the primary background against which philosophers raised concerns about thoughts, feelings, intentionality, and rationality. Psychologists, in contrast, have worked within a materialist framework. But given that many or even most philosophers of emotion probably would describe themselves as physicalists or materialists, it’s important to get clear about the nature of this so-called “dualist” background against which philosophers theorize about emotion. What Mun actually has in mind, I think, is that most philosophical accounts rest on a Cartesian assumption to the effect that the mind and body are distinct, and that thoughts and bodily feelings are separable. Psychological accounts, in contrast, are not so much under the influence of this thought/body dichotomy.
To see this Cartesian thought/body dichotomy at work, consider Mun’s discussion of the accounts of Prinz and Nussbaum in Chap 9. She maintains that Prinz is working within a materialistic framework (which emphasizes the bodily dimension of emotion), whereas Nussbaum is working within a mentalistic framework (which emphasizes the cognitive/evaluative dimension of emotion). But the key issue, I take it, is that both theorists are operating with a Cartesian assumption to the effect that these are ontologically distinct or separable dimensions of emotion. Indeed, what permeates the longstanding philosophical debate between so-called cognitive and bodily theories of emotion is a tendency to treat the cognitive and bodily dimensions as fundamentally distinct or separable, and then to identify emotions with one or other of these dimensions.
The early Solomon (1993), for example, argues that “feelings” are not a central or essential feature of emotions, but rather an ornamentation. According to his cognitive account, fear cannot be a mere bodily feeling because the physiological contour of fear is no different from the physiological contour of anger; and while fear can be appropriate or inappropriate, feelings cannot. Instead, emotion should be understood as an evaluative judgment about one’s situation, a “personal evaluation of the significance of [a particular] incident” that projects our values and ideals (1993, 126). A central motivation for the feeling theory, on the other hand, is the
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commonsense idea that bodily feeling is essential to emotion, which seems to flow directly from the phenomenology of emotional experience. Along these lines, Whiting (2009) identifies emotions with feelings, characterizes emotions as non-cognitive, and maintains that fear should be identified with the “awful edgy sensation that assails my guts and limbs” (287).
Despite their divergent views on what defines emotions, both sides seem to agree that bodily feeling is non-cognitive and non-intentional. To see this, note that like Solomon, Whiting denies that bodily feelings have objects or a representational structure. He maintains that the edgy feeling that pervades my guts and limbs upon seeing a tiger just is the emotion (fear), and that the representation of a tiger is not part of this experience. In order to account for the fact that “fear-of-tiger” and other object-directed emotions do seem to involve mental representations, Whiting recommends that such mental states be viewed as composite mental states consisting of an emotion (a feeling) and a thought (with representational content). This compound mental episode comprises a feeling together with a representation, but the sensation “presents only as a non-representational feeling state.” (Whiting 2012, 100). Thus, although they disagree about what constitutes the essence of emotion, both the early Solomon and Whiting seem to agree that thought and feeling are detachable components, and that bodily feelings are non-intentional and have no representational content.
However, a growing number of emotion theorists have begun to challenge the alleged split between the bodily and cognitive components of emotion. Colombetti (2007, 2010), for example, has argued that emotions are simultaneously bodily and cognitive-evaluative and that bodily feelings are constitutive of the sense of personal significance that emotions involve. Thus, there is good reason to think that the appraisal and bodily aspects of emotion are constitutively interdependent (Colombetti, 2013); rather than being extrinsic to or a mere byproduct of appraisal, bodily arousal is part of the very experience of appraisal, as a vehicle of salience. For example, an interview-situation is evaluated and experienced as anxiety-provoking in-and-through the state of one’s body, so that the process of appraisal overlaps with the bodily dimension of emotion (Colombetti 2013, 112). Central to Colombetti’s account is the notion that emotions are enactive, that is, they are a matter of active bodily engagement. During an emotional experience, subjects do not simply passively receive information from their environment, but instead actively participate in the generation of meaning. They do so by becoming selectively attuned to their surroundings in and through their affectively aroused bodies.
In chapter 1, Mun suggests that, to the extent that embodied cognitive theories regard both thoughts and feelings to be necessary constituents of emotions, they reject the thought/feeling dichotomy established by cognitive and noncognitive theories. But in her view, since embodied cognitive theories typically hold that some form of thought is essential to an emotional experience, they still can be regarded as “cognitive theories.” The embodied cognitive theory presented by Colombetti, however, treats thought and bodily feeling as inseparable; thus, it does not make the sorts of Cartesian assumptions that are pervasive throughout much of the literature on emotion. Indeed, by emphasizing the interdependence between bodily and cognitive dimensions of emotion, Colombetti’s account undermines the notion that bodily feelings lack any sort of representational content; it also challenges the assumption that appraisal is a “heady” intellectual process that takes place apart from bodily arousal. In addition, this account moves us away from the notion that emotions are passive and explores how the bodily elements of emotional experience might make an active and significant contribution to the appraisal process. Together with the amygdala, bodily arousal and endocrine activity help to maintain an organism’s homeostatic equilibrium, enhance attention, and prepare the individual for action. Thus, the appraisal process is best characterized as a broadly organismic activity, one which overlaps with the bodily component of emotion (Colombetti 2013, p. 112). Colombetti’s enactivist account thereby treats emotions as embodied, enactive cognitions, and also draws linkages between emotion and the dynamics of living systems.
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In chapter 9, Mun states that she aims to present an embodied cognitive theory of emotion, one which explains how the body plays a non-trivial, constitutive role in emotional experiences. But why think that semantic dualism can provide an adequate backdrop for an embodied cognitive approach? Mun’s commitment to type-identity theory (and the corresponding idea that emotional experiences are ontologically reducible to their neural correlates) seems incompatible with the idea that the body plays a constitutive role in emotional experience. In an apparent effort to resist this sort of neuroreductionism, Mun suggests that although each of the components of emotion can be specified in terms of its neural correlates, it is only when these components are integrated “as an explanation of a sufficiently complete emotional experience” that we can regard them as aspects of an emotional experience. And in Chap 10, Mun maintains that “emotions are not simply the material processes that constitute emotional experiences, but also the unique ways in which such processes can be integrated in order to yield the variety of emotional experiences that are experienced by emotional beings” (Mun 2021, 274). In Chap 9, it seems that Mun is pointing to some sort of explanatory integration, but the quote from Chap 10 is less clear. Does Mun think that some sort of ontological integration is at stake? If these various components can be cashed out in terms of brain activity, and emotional experiences (like all experiences) are type-identical to neural correlates, then in what sense does the body beyond the brain play a constitutive role? Embodied cognitive theories of emotion, as I understand them, aim to account for the ontological integration of emotion’s evaluative/cognitive dimension and its bodily dimension. I worry that semantic dualism is unable to provide an adequate metaphysical backdrop for such an account.
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References
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_____. 2010. “Enaction, Sense-making, and Emotion.” In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, edited by John Stewart, Oliver Gapenne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo, 145-164. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Michelle Maiese © 2023
Author email: maiesemi[at]emmanuel.edu
