Functions of affect

Although theorists diverge over the details of affect, they typically agree that it provides something beneficial to the well-being of its organisms. These functions can be clustered into three types that—coincidentally, of course—also inform the desiderata of a theory of emotion: informational content, intentionality, and motivation.

3.1.3.1 Affect’s informational content

The majority position in the literature is that affective qualities represent current conditions of the body (e.g., Barrett, 2017; Damasio & Carvalho, 2013; Russell, 1980, 2003). A phrase often used to capture what a change in affect represents isdeviation from homeostasis. De- viations from homeostasis often indicate detrimental changes to the organism’s body such as tissue damage or a lack of metabolic fuel, though they can also indicate beneficial events such as the acquisition of fuel or the opportunity to copulate.

A shift from one point in the affective state space to another reflects a shift in the organ- ism’s bodily condition. The affective quality of a state of hunger or a headache might creep into consciousness very slowly, over the course of hours, while other affective states such as those accompanying or comprising sharp pains and orgasms might reflect instantaneous deviations from a prior state.

As mentioned above, affect is generated by interoception. But Barrett takes care to ex- plicate her belief that interoception does not exist for the sake of producing affect (Barrett, 2017, 72-73). Nor does she believe that an explanation of interoception brings with it an explanation of affect:

Interoception did not evolve for you to have feelings but to regulate your body budget. It helps your brain track your temperature, how much glucose you are using, whether you have any tissue damage, whether your heart is pounding, whether your muscles are stretching, and other bodily conditions, all at the same

time. Your affective feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and calmness and ag- itation, are simple summaries of your budgetary state. Are you flush? Are you overdrawn? Do you need a deposit, and if so, how desperately? (Barrett, 2017, 73)

Barrett’s position is echoed by many other theorists, and I think it’s a fine working theory of affect’s informational content. The general affective system informs the experiencing organ- ism of how it is faring at the moment.

3.1.3.2 The intentionality of affect

By representing deviations from homeostasis, affective states intend toward the organism’s

body. The information they convey regarding the organism’s body point towardsthatorgan-

ism as an individual.

But on their own, affective states do not say anything about the world outside the or- ganism. There’s no self-other divide denoted by general affective feelings, and there’s no indication of anything outside of the organism’s body to which it can react or upon which it can act. A general affective state, uncoupled from sensory registration or perceptual states, does not point the organism toward any feature of its environment.

I should point out that not all theorists agree with this claim. Colombetti, for instance, takes the intentionality of affectivity to be world-directed. Affectivity, on her theory, is an organism’s means of “making sense” of its world: “. . . all living systems aresense-makingsys- tems, namely. . . , they inhabit a world that is significant for them, a world that they them- selves enact or bring forth as the correlate of their needs and concerns” (Colombetti, 2014, 2). She says that affectivity is the “bringing forth” of this world (2014, 21). But this con- strual requires that all organisms that are capable of affectivity are simultaneously capable of receiving sensory inputs from the world. An organism’s affectivity, on Colombetti’s view, logically depends on its possessing exteroceptive capacities. If Damasio and Carvalho are

correct in claiming that interoceptors evolved prior to exteroceptors (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013, 145), and if affect is a consequence of interoception, then Colombetti’s requirement here is unwarranted.

However, if affect is intended toward the organism rather than its environment, a general capacity for affect could exist in a solipsistic creature. It is conceivable that a simple organism lacking exteroceptive systems would still be capable of experiencing affect if it possessed a capacity for interoception. Although its affective states would intend towards itself, this intentional quality would not be particularly helpful in many environments. Perhaps such technically senseless creatures existed prior to the Cambrian Explosion. Imagine a primitive bivalve creature that opens and closes a mouth-like structure in order to filter the water for nutrients, but that lacks the capacity to do anything else: it spends its life adhered to a single rock on the sea floor. Imagine also that this particular breed of bivalve has the capacity for associative learning. If the bivalve is able to form associations between its interoceptive states and its behaviors (opening and closing its “mouth”), then chances are it is also able to experience affective states like hunger and satiation. It could then learn to open its “mouth” when hungry. The gradual transition the bivalve experiences, specifically the graduation from experiencing hunger to experiencing satiation, constitutes its affective system’s state space. But when it reaches the point of satiation, it may learn that leaving its mouth open leads to an unpleasant experience (due to having consumed more than it can comfortably digest). Consequently, it will learn to associate the experience of satiation with the behavior of closing its “mouth”. Affectivity, then, helps this solipsistic bivalve make sense of its own bodily states and behavioral capabilities.

3.1.3.3 Affect motivates action

If Ginsburg and Jablonka’s account of the minimal conditions for affective experience is close to the truth then many other creatures throughout the world’s environments are capable of

at least some affective states—even creatures whose neural architectures are significantly less sophisticated than mammals or birds or octopuses. In that case, a general affect system is arguably the most primitive motivator to have evolved in Earth’s organisms. How does activity across a network of neurons come to motivate its host organism?

The explanation Ginsburg and Jablonka offer is tied to their description of associative learning, and it centers around the notion of organismic value. They write that the sort of open-ended associative learning described above involves “attributing intrinsic, whole- organism ‘value’” to novel associations (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2007b, 232). Value, as they use the term here, appears to track ecological concerns:

. . . the individual organism must have internal criteria for deciding whether a new association or a new behavior is appropriate: it must be able to evalu- ate, during its own lifetime, whether a response is generally beneficial or detri- mental. It must have an internal, flexible, yet robust, evaluative system, which

can assessnewstimuli and responses in a highly context-dependent, ontogeny-

sensitive manner. (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2007b, 232; original emphasis)

If an organism is able to make such assessments of its novel input–response associations, the authors say, that organism has acquired areward system(Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2007b, 232). Each such system has a value that is either “positive” or “negative” (these quotation marks are the authors’)—a quality of valence, or something like it at least. If an organism behaves in a way that leads to tissue damage (say, pushing against a sharp-ended object), this will alter its overall sensation and produce a negative affective state which will in turn lead to a different behavior which, hopefully for the organism, will lead to a positive affective state (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2007b, 236-237). Thus, the overall function of these affective reward systems “is to inform the animal about its present deviation” from its ideal condi- tion, “and guide it towards reaching it by directing adaptive behaviour that is based on past history” (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2010a, 117). Once such feelings evolved in organisms, “they

became central organizing causes and navigators for the animals [sic] goal-oriented actions” (Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2010a, 117; emphasis removed).

While Ginsburg and Jablonka’s theory allows attribution of affect to creatures as simple as the solipsistic bivalve mentioned above,29_{most affective scientists are interested primarily}

in human psychology. Indeed, affect motivates differently according to organisms’ capacities to react to their affective states. Regarding human affect, Barrett holds that it functions not to motivate us to particular action, but to prompt the brain to search for explanations of what’s going on: that is, to make sense of one’s interoceptive state: “Your brain constantly uses past experience to predict which objects and events will impact your body budget, changing your affect” (Barrett, 2017, 73). On the other hand, to seek and acquire knowledge arguably is a form of behavior. While our solipsistic bivalve knows only to open its “mouth” in response to its feeling of hunger, we humans can train ourselves to recognize our hunger as indicative

of a need to acquire food. We can then act on that need with the intention of acquiring

food—not simply (like the bivalve) with the intention of diminishing our feelings of hunger.