How to Design an Emotion The Deconstruction and Computation of Emotional Meaning from First Principles (Universal Moral Concepts III)

Abstract

We stake our lives on ideas no one has pinned down. I begin with emotion because there the failure strikes closest to home. You feel before you explain; you react before you interpret. You name a feeling jealousy long before anyone has settled what entitles it to that name.

Emotion science commits the same error. Researchers trace emotion to the body, quick judgments, or culture, and seldom settle what an emotion is. I deny none of the parts: the body stirs, and feelings are real; but no part can pose as the whole. Others have argued that the world does not flip emotions on like a switch; we construct them. I agree, then part company on two points. I name what makes an emotion the emotion it is, and I place a reasoning person in command of its interpretation.

The ascent has three levels. Affect comes first: the body’s raw activity, its arousal and its pull toward or away. Feeling comes second: your conscious awareness of that activity. Emotion comes third: the act of interpreting a feeling through concepts, symbols, and values. Do events cause your emotions, or do you construct them by interpreting your feelings? Do infants and animals possess emotions, or real affect that never reaches the symbols an emotion requires? I answer both.

Seven frameworks meet seven problems along three arcs: identity and meaning; the passage from the affect you feel to emotional meaning; and the language that makes that meaning public. I end by uniting them in one account of affect, feeling, and emotion. Affect delivers information, emotion delivers meaning, and values deliver reasons; the verdict belongs to you, the reasoning agent, who decides what to endorse and act on.

This puts you at the center. You can examine how you read your own feelings, correct your errors, and rebuild the habits that produce them, as an engineer redraws a faulty circuit. Name the ideas that govern your life. Test them. Discipline them. Then, and only then, live by them.

Key concepts

Emotional Constructivism

“The position that emotions are cognitive-semiotic constructions and, as its defining claim, that a rational agent can inspect and redesign the interpretive architecture that produces emotional meaning.”

Affect

“Affect is the body’s physiological and regulatory machinery: it creates the conditions for feeling and never becomes feeling or emotion itself.” (Chapter 14)

Feeling

“Feeling is your consciousness of affect, available for interpretation, with its own phenomenological timbre.” (Chapter 14)

Emotion

“Emotion is a goal-governed, context-sensitive interpretive construct: you assign meaning to feeling by organizing its timbre into emotion categories that detachable symbols hold steady.” (Chapter 14)

Theory of Constrained Identity

“The theory that identity conditions constrain admissible variation without eliminating flexibility.”

Emotional Meaning Architecture

“A threshold model of ten levels, 0 through 9, from computational mapping and physiological activation to recursive emotional self-regulation.”

Constructivist Semiotic Model of Emotions

“The Constructivist Semiotic Model of Emotions turns feeling into meaning.” (Chapter 14)

Emotionese

“My Emotionese is a symbolic system: identifiers, objects, contexts, and stake under rules.” (Chapter 10)

Misattribution

“The misattribution begins when agents treat inference as detection.” (Chapter 12)

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