Emotional Sense 1

Running head: EMOTIONAL SENSE

The Emotional Sense: A Moral Compass

Katherine T. Peil

EFS International
12626 NE 114th Place
Kirkland, WA 98033

Phone: (425) 828-4114

FAX: (425) 828-4544
Email: ktpeil@comcast.net

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Abstract

A cybernetic feedback model recasts emotion as a primary sensory system, rooted in

ancient stimulus-response behavioral mechanics. Although traditionally viewed as instinctive

bodily “responses”, emotional feeling tones—like perceptions of sound or color—also deliver

information-rich sensory stimulus that concerns optimal interactions between humans and their

physical and sociocultural environment. The model suggests that the hedonic categories and their

good/bad subjective appraisals emerge from fundamental positive and negative feedback processes

which relate to dual self-regulatory behavioral regimes and right states of homeostatic balance—

calling into question the traditional good/evil moral dichotomy. Distinctions are made between

biologically evaluative, cognitively judgmental, and universally moral meaning dimensions

encoded within basic and complex feeling tones, and the implications for moral reasoning are

discussed.

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The wisdom of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) has oft been quoted: “Man has been placed

under the governance of two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain.” Despite this insight,

psychologists have long been puzzled by the ubiquitous phenomenon of emotion—psychic

pleasure and pain. Indeed, it has been difficult to tease emotion apart from physiological

responses (James, 1890), from reflexes, and biological drives, motivational appetites and defenses

(Cannon, 1927), from cognitive appraisals (Schachter & Singer 1962), from moral intuitions

(Haidt, 2001a); to reconcile divergent functional theories (i.e., levels of analysis, specificity vs.

generality, manner of organization, and range of focus (Keltner & Gross 1999), or to make sense

of the many cultural similarities and differences evidenced (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992), so

difficult, that definitive theorizing about emotion has all but gone out of fashion. Hence,

Kleinginna & Kleinginna (1981) identified over ninety definitions of emotion and, as recently as

1997, the philosopher Paul Griffiths (1997, p. 14) wrote: “My central conclusion is that the

general concept of emotion is unlikely to be a useful concept in psychological theory.”

My purpose is to suggest that emotion has not remained categorically and functionally

mysterious due to generality, but because the traditional approach has been overly specific,

anthropomorphic, narrow, and “preemptive” (Zajonc, 2003). I will argue that the regulatory

patterns of emotional pain and pleasure hearken much further back in our evolutionary history

than yet supposed, and play a much more important functional role. I will also argue that the

empirical study of emotion has been stymied by a fundamental violation of the rule of parsimony.

Wouldn’t the simplest assumption be: What feels good is “right” and what feels bad is “wrong”…

by biological dictate? Doesn’t it make sense that the universal pursuit of pleasure and avoidance

of pain might relate to naturally optimum or deficit states of some sort? Instead, the cultural,

legal, and moral ramifications of the notion that human hedonism might be “good” are enough to

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send any sensible scientist scurrying down safer empirical avenues. As such, we remain saddled

with the premature conclusion that emotions themselves are outdated “responses” that are “suited

poorly to modern exigencies” (Gross, 1998), and nearly universal cultural consensus that

emotions should be suppressively regulated, to the degree one prominent etiquette advisor

“maintains a list of emotions that should never be experienced let alone expressed” (Martin, 1984,

pp 115).

Certainly there is merit to the intuition that something is “bad” about negative emotion. The

fight and flight responses typically accompanying such painful feelings as anger, disgust, fear,

rage, and hate can indeed be disrupters of moral, even willful, thought and action. Plus, there is

plenty of evidence linking excessive negative emotion with immune dysfunction, cardiovascular

disease (McClelland, 1982); endocrine dysfunction (Buck, Miller & Caul, 1974); and cancer

(Hagnell, 1986), not to mention a host of mental disorders. But by virtue of their formidable

persistence and disruptive power, shouldn’t bad feelings be worthy of our respect? Might we be

blaming the messenger and missing a crucial message? Perhaps our bad feelings are trying to tell

us that something is wrong—so wrong, that if we miss the biological message we hurry our own

demise? Furthermore, recent pioneering work in the field of positive emotion (Csikszentmihalyi,

1990; Seligman, 1991; Deiner & Larson, 1993; Lipton, 1998, Fredrickson, 1998; Isen, 2000;

Haidt, 2001b) suggests that what feels good (flow, optimism, joy, interest, love, contentment,

elevation) assists us in optimal adaptation. Good feelings tell us that something is right—so right

that we gain positive effects in our intellectual and social development, our thought processes, our

moral reasoning, and our physical and mental well being. Perhaps we are missing messages about

biologically right states, states that we can willfully reinforce, reproduce, and creatively amplify?

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So if emotions might contain messages of right and wrong states, this immediately begs two

questions: 1. Where are the messages coming from? and 2. What do they mean? I will address

these questions while introducing a new homeodynamic feedback model that recasts emotion as a

primal sensory system so ancient that it predates neural organization, yet so evolutionarily

complex and elegant that its modern perceptual messages provide a universally efficient yet

personally tailored moral compass. The cybernetic feedback context provides a holistic tree-top

vantage which elucidates the intricate connective paths within the disorienting emotional forest,

unveiling a self-organizing evolutionary function that gives rise to its “self-regulatory” (e.g.

Mischel & Mischel, 1976) character. From this vantage, it becomes apparent that while we are

busy regulating our emotions, our emotions are actually trying to regulate us—and from a much

more ancient, wiser, and biophysically valid, moral authority. Indeed, in times of terror, epidemic

depression and pain-numbing addiction, when faith in human nature seems to have ebbed, this

model offers a far more optimistic future for the species.

Where Do Emotional Messages Come From?

Emotions are commonly referred to as “perceptions” (i.e. “what is emotion the perception

of?” (Damasio, 1999, p314); “the amygdala…a crucial structure in emotional perception” (Dolan,

2002, p1194), yet the implications of this terminology have gone unnoticed. In introductory

psychology texts, perception is defined as the “interpretation of sensory information”, and

sensation is defined as “the conversion of energy from the environment into a pattern of response”

(Kalat, 1999). So the simple answer is that emotional messages come from the environment, as

sensory perceptions of energy stimuli from both external and internal worlds. Like sounds, smells,

or colors, feelings deliver packages of information via the body to the mind—information that is

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multi-tiered, encoded within emotion’s unique blend of cognitive and behavioral perceptual

responses. I will argue that emotional sensory information comes courtesy of ancient yet

intricately complex regulatory feedback networks that yield global behavioral control via local

electrodynamic signaling (Presman, 1970, Pohl, 1983) and electrochemical “signal transduction

cascades” (Goodenough, 1998, p 42). Hence, the complex answer begins with the threefold

suggestion that: 1) The function of emotion concerns the integration, coherence, and regulation of

one’s physical identity within the immediate environment; 2) its “self-relevant” sensory stimulus

is ultimately rooted in electrical activity and optimal energy balances; and 3) its behavioral

manifestations are born of electrostatic forces of attraction and repulsion.

Who Put the Self in Self-Relevance & Self-regulation?

This follows from reconceptualizing “the self” as a physical rather than psychological

construct, wherein “identity” is defined as the body’s ongoing chemical activity. Psychologists

can bypass dualistic paradoxes and explore relatively uncharted reductionistic frontiers in both

identity and behavior, by revisiting several facts from chemistry: First, all biological organisms

are self-organizing, “dissipative structures” (Prigogine & Nicolis, 1998), surviving by

temporarily harnessing, converting, and transferring energy (until their eventual entropic demise)

via chemical reactions. Second, all chemical reactions rely on the simple behavior of electrons—

their wave/particle manifestations, their ordered filling of energy shells within atoms of any

unique element, their comings and goings from one atom to another, and the molecular bond-

making and bond-breaking that results. Third, the behavior and number of electrons is the

defining characteristic that distinguishes the unique identity of the various elements (witness the

nomenclature of the periodic table), and as large organized bags of chemicals contained by our

skin, the same is true for each human identity. Fourth, the self-organizing transformations from

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one chemical identity to another are determined by stimulus-response behaviors that flow from

the simple attract-repel mechanics of electrodynamics (atoms stimulated by gains or losses of

electrons respond by attraction to others with opposite charge and repulsion from those with like

charge). Fifth, the mechanized—self-regulated—attract/repel behavior of atoms yields identity

stability by restoration of right states of energy balance (maintaining the right number of

electrons at each energy level, including eight in the outermost valence shell—the octet rule),

despite the never-ending inner electronic perturbations and outer molecular transformations.

There are several crucial psychological insights to be gained by defining the self

chemically. The first is the primary link of self-relevance between emotion and electricity—both

mysterious yet ubiquitous processes that have long remained conceptually isolated, at least in

terms of theory. Yet in practice, changes in electromagnetic states are routinely used to measure

emotional responses (i.e. EEG, EMG, EKG, EDM, PET, MRI); various emotions can be elicited

by direct electrical stimulation of the brain (i.e. merriment/mirth – the supplementary motor area

(SMA) and anterior cingulated cortex; fear and sadness – the periaqueductal gray (PAG)

Damasio, 2003, pp 74-76); and psychiatrists have historically used electricity to treat depression

(ECT). A second insight is that the complex human identity is a fractal (self-similar at various

levels of scale) “maxi-self” gestalt of interacting subatomic, atomic, molecular/genetic, neural,

and cognitive “mini-self” identity components, each self-organizing within their own relative

time/space environment (rather like a set of Russian nesting dolls), yet connected via electro-

chemical communicative networks. Global behavioral coherence is born of stimulus-response

signal transduction cascades (rather like dominoes all falling one after the other)—those that I will

argue underlie the bottom-up informational and behavioral components of emotional perception.

In this context, human identity is a highly dynamic state rather than a fixed set of personality

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characteristics wherein a potentially self-relevant alteration can occur even as the body changes

its immediate location in space; inhales or ingests anything from the environment; fires off

neurons in mindful recollection or volitional thought; or absorbs even a single electron. A third

insight is that right states of balance are defined and determined by our chemistry, and mediated

by self-regulated energy-exchange behavioral mechanics at the most fundamental physical level.

Indeed, our cellular behaviors ensure that the right proteins with the right conformations arrange

themselves in the right places at the right times, but their assembly of the right molecular mixtures

in the right amounts depends upon the right behavior of elemental atoms, and ultimately upon the

right behaviors of electrons. These self-organizing optimums were in place long before the

evolutionary emergence of cognitive or even neural identity constructs and even before genetic

identity blueprints with their “selfish gene” (Dawkins, 1989) regulatory machinery, and survival

imperatives. This brings the question of morality—the optimal regulation of behavior—into the

realm of hard science, where reconceiving emotion as a sensory system offers some intriguing

suggestions about the right/wrong evaluative criteria within natural selection. For in the fractal

human identity set when subatomic, atomic, genetic, neural, and cognitive Russian dolls

communicate about self-relevant changes and the dominoes fall, they are already falling in one

specific direction—the right direction, whether any consciousness of the process exists or not.

The First Sense?

In this context emotion is not a newly evolved sense, but perhaps the very first sensory

system to have emerged, functioning as a core physical form of stimulus-response perception,

which still underlies the more complex and specialized senses. Indeed, all sensory stimulus

receptors also respond to direct electrical stimulation and exhibit homeostatic thresholds wherein

extreme stimulation (i.e. sunlight too bright, music too loud, limburger too pungent) may also be

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perceived as noxious if not painful (Starr & Taggart, 1998; p 590), and particular sorts of

“unconditioned” stimuli (i.e. sunsets, harmonic music, the scent of food or one’s mate) are

inherently pleasing and attractive. Likewise, the bizarre condition of synesthesia, the

commingling of the senses, finds its expression dependant upon the limbic system (Cytowic,

1993), the brain structures long touted as the seat of emotion. But rather than nominating one

particular structure as “the” emotional sensory organ (e.g. the amygdala or even the limbic

system), I prefer to address human emotional perceptions as emergent properties of the entire

electrochemical identity network. This includes both the central nervous system’s neuron-axon-

dendrite-neurotransmitter pathways (with its inhibitive and excitative lateral connections), as well

as the more far flung neuropeptide ligand-receptor chemical network deemed the “molecules of

emotion” (Pert, 1997), which together provide integrated body-brain communication across all

fractal levels. Perhaps even more fundamental sensory pathways involve the “liquid crystalline”

nature of living organisms that facilitate “quantum coherence” recently discovered by biochemists

(Ho, 1998).

However intriguing the physiological questions, my purpose is first and foremost to suggest

that emotion does indeed function as a sense, one that only comes to light when it is broadly

expanded (well beyond the term “affect”) redefined, and reframed within the lens of the physical

sciences. From this alternate perspective, I will offer a unique theoretical paradigm wherein the

emotional sense plays a key self-organizing role in evolution—born of fundamental feedback

interactions within and between all material “self-units”, feedback processes that are inherent in

the energy exchange process itself. I will argue that the behavioral manifestations of emotion

emerge from simple stimulus-response behavioral mechanics that negotiate, preserve, expand, and

redefine the relative boundaries within, across, and between all self-organizing life forms, and give

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rise to what humans experience as emotional feelings. I will suggest that nature’s primordial

right/wrong evaluative—and moral code—is not rooted in a good/evil dichotomy as our traditional

moral authorities suggest, but in feedback signaling and coupled self-correcting responses that

maintain optimal states of electrochemical balance between any relative chemical unit and its local

environment. In this context the hedonic valence encodes dual adaptive value criteria within

natural selection—ancient, negentropic, self-regulatory purposes if you will: self-preservation

(survival) and self-development (adaptation). I will suggest that although the majority of the

regulatory functions are performed subconsciously by the “body-self”, the emotional perceptions

that erupt into awareness offer the “mind-self” richly detailed information about its crucial role in

the process—sensory information without which our species remains morally challenged.

To begin, I will offer my own working definition: Emotion is an interoceptive sensory

system that serves the biological function of evaluative, self-regulatory, behavioral adaptation by

delivering two or more elements of a three-part perceptual response: 1) A digital (either/or)

positive or negative “hedonic” valence; 2) an approach or avoid action tendency to move toward

or move away (linked to the hedonic valence); and 3) a subjective feeling tone (i.e., joy, fear,

anger, etc.) which delivers cognitive appraisal information.

The Feedback Paradigm

I base my argument for its primary self-regulatory function upon the phenomenon of

feedback. Indeed, the electrochemical information super-highways, byways and transit stations

within a human body are born of a web-work of interconnected feedback loops and feedback

networks. Although feedback is central to all electronic circuitry (Waldhauer, 1982; Friauf, 1998;

Diorio & Rao, 2000; Hahnloser, Sarpeshkar, Mahowald, Douglas, & Seung, 2000; Palumbo &

Pennisi, 2002); a key component in nonlinear mathematics (e.g. Thieffry & Kaufman, 1995) and

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fractal geometry (Mandlebrot, 1977); has a ubiquitous presence in the regulation of genetic

expression (e.g. Niswander, Jeffrey, Martin & Tickle, 1994; Mendoza, Thieffry, & Alvarez-

Buylla, 1999; Freeman & Gurdon, 2002); as well as neural information processing circuits (Rapp,

Albano, & Mees 1988) and sensory perception (Freeman, 1991); it has been largely absent from

theoretical approaches to human emotion (notable exceptions include James, 1890; Tomkins,

1962; Laird, 1974; Zajonc, 1985; Carver & Scheier, 1990; Frijda, 2000; Heilman, 2000; LeDoux

& Phelps, 2000; Clore, Wyer, Dienes, Gasper, Gohm, & Isbell, 2001). Of course, feedback has

only recently taken center stage due to the new nonlinear dynamic sciences collectively known as

chaos (e.g. Gleick, 1988), and as British scientist Steve Grand put it: “Feedback is what has been

missing in science since Newton” (Malone, 2002). Nonetheless, understanding feedback is crucial

to our moral discussion since the pleasure/pain evaluative stimulus categories within emotional

perceptions are rooted directly in positive and negative feedback processes inherent within our

electrical circuitry. As such, the simple feedback rules provide the biologically evaluative bedrock

—the natural values—from whence all higher-level cognitive judgments concerning good and

bad, or right and wrong, ultimately emerge. In short, they offer the core evaluative meaning that

allows us to decipher the many levels of information encoded within the emotional sensory

message.

What is feedback?

So what is feedback? In general, feedback describes a “pattern of monitoring and

responding to a constant flow of information about an organism’s internal and external

environments” (see Starr & Taggart, 1998, p 554-555 for a general biological discussion). More

specifically, the word feedback means any circular situation in which information on a system’s

behavior is fed back into that system and used to modify its future behavior, wherein “recursion

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involves self-correction” (see Becvar & Becvar, 1996, p 66-70; and de Rosnay, 1997; for

cybernetic discussions). Feedback also underlies the long-term behavioral patterns that emerge

despite seemingly random interim behavior (see Briggs & Peat, 1989, for an excellent nonlinear

system discussion). In short, feedback is the cyclic regulatory control process that transfers

information from the environment across a system and affects self-correcting changes that

influence the system’s future interaction with the environment. But both the “control” and

“information” emerge as functions of the system within its immediate environment, with

regulation neither completely determined by the system nor by the environment, but by their

reciprocally combined effect upon one another. (I suspect feedback is inherent in the reciprocal

causality between electricity and magnetism and the wave/particle manifestations of electrons—

and indeed all matter, with information patterns relating to wave interference). Regardless of how

they emerge however, clearly these information exchanges allow “sensitivity to initial conditions”

and to environmental changes, and they push and pull the system toward identity “attractors” that

determine immediate behavior—two key conditions within emergent self-organizing complexity.

Feedback sensitivity also underlies the phenomenon of “positional information” (Wolpert, 1969)

wherein “suborganismic components (such as cells) act in response to positional cues by

interpreting a positional information field” (Levin, 1994) in order to determine their optimal

morphogenic developmental state (also see Thelan & Smith, 1994, p 45-69 for an excellent

nonlinear dynamics discussion.) Informational feedback is fundamental to all levels of self-

organization, crossing each local time/space dimension, yielding network node connections, and

providing global identity information about self, not self, and even not-yet self such that adaptive

self-corrections occur at the right times and in the right places. And of course, I am suggesting

that this core feedback sensitivity is inherent within the electrical circuitry and energy balancing

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mechanics of living systems, serves as a core form of physical perception, and ultimately gives

rise to subjective emotional sensory cues.

This argument begins to take shape when we examine the two types of feedback loops:

positive and negative: Positive feedback is associated with chaotic runaway change, instability,

amplification, exponential growth or decline, divergent behavior, and emergent self-organizing

complexity. Positive feedback loops accelerate a transformative event in the same direction with

additive and cumulative effects yielding a phase-locking, excitative stimulus explosion or an

inhibitive, out-of-phase, “noisy” interference or blocking affect. In other words, positive feedback

loops are self-reinforcing, wherein you get more and more (or less and less) of whatever sort of

change you started with. By amplifying perturbations, positive feedback pushes the system away

from its existing control parameters, often resulting in bifurcations that bump the system from one

attractor or behavioral regime to another. Conversely, negative feedback is associated with

stability, equilibrium, and convergent behavior. It maintains optimal stimulus thresholds and

equilibrium conditions, often reversing the conditions that caused the change in order to return the

system to its preferred state. In other words, unlike positive feedback, negative feedback has a

purposive goal serving as it’s main attractor, the point where it will ultimately return following

perturbation—its equilibrium or its preferred “right” state. Negative feedback kicks in when high

or low thresholds are breached and either reduces or increases the stimulus to restore the optimal

balance. (A home heating thermostat is a common example, wherein the actual temperature is

monitored and compared against the desired preset temperature, and mismatches trigger the heat

to click on or off.)

However, “when positive and negative feedback loops couple together, they can create a

new dynamic balance—a bifurcation point where chaotic activity suddenly branches off into

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order” (Briggs & Peat, 1999, p 16). Indeed, although the initial feedback loop is local and self-

referential, living feedback systems attain global cohesion via complex networked

interconnections wherein either second, third, or fourth order positive or negative feedback loops

tip the system toward instability or stability anywhere along the line. In terms of electrical

circuitry, both types of loops interact to serve as linear and nonlinear resisters, capacitors,

oscillators, and inductors, yielding small and large signals with analog and digital informational

features (e.g. Diorio & Rao, 2000; Hahnloser et al, 2000; Cinquin & Derongeot, 2002). The

complexities of feedback circuitry within multi-cellular organisms are as staggering as they are

intriguing and biophysicists have yet to hammer out all the details. But fortunately, the ubiquity of

feedback speaks for itself and we need not become experts on physics or electrical engineering for

this discussion. For by examining the functional components of the feedback process and its

behavioral outcomes, we can readily identify a meaning-rich self-regulatory pattern which is “at

work at all levels of biological activity, from biochemical interactions within single cells to

ecological interactions in the biosphere” Starr & Taggart, 1987, p 310). This is where the chaos

associated with positive feedback and the stability of negative feedback couple together into the

classic stimulus-response arrangement, offering a bridge back into familiar psychological

territory. This is where the functional concepts of “positive and negative” within feedback

intersect with “positive and negative” mathematical values, iterations, and balanced equations and

those of “positive and negative” electrical charges, stimulus thresholds, environmental state space

“attractors” and optimal “attract or repel” global behavioral responses—and where we find the

innate meaning encoded within “positive and negative” emotion.

Three Functional Components of Feedback Systems

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These patterns come to light when we return to the fractal nature of self-organization, but

shift from the relative notion of identity to the subjective perspective and objective behavior of

any specific self-unit in a given location in time and space (e.g. the self in question could be either

an atom, a molecule, a cell, or a multi-cellular organism). In this context each self serves as a

local closed-loop feedback system (with its identity defined by chemical structure and/or any

boundary-creating membrane or other epithelial tissues), continuously responding to incoming

feedback information from its “not-self” environment—an ongoing stream of analogue

information concerning the quality and intensity of electrochemical stimulus from both internal

and external realms. From this perspective each individual self-unit operates as a negative

feedback system, maintaining homeostasis in the classic thermostatic sort of feedback

arrangement. Each has its own chemically defined energy thresholds, preferred attractor states,

and behavioral regimes that reverse perturbations and regulate optimal electrochemical identity

balance (just like the home heating thermostat regulates the heat).

This common thermostatic system yields self-regulation via three common functional

operations unfolding as sequential steps in an ongoing cycle: comparison, signal, and self-

correction. First, they systematically integrate and compare actual electrochemical stimulus states

against the preexisting (right state) biological optimums; second, they signal when threshold

breaching imbalances occur; and third, the signal triggers corrections (effectors, behavioral

responses) that restore equilibrium by either reducing or increasing the stimulus accordingly. The

corrective response not only rights the local self, but in doing so may also perpetuate the change

across other levels of the global network—yielding the signal transduction function of a positive

feedback circuit. This occurs with stimulus adjusting corrections that facilitate synchronization

with nearest–neighbor signaling and yield the “slaving” (e.g. Thelan & Smith, 2002; p55) of

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formerly unrelated modes into a collective behavior. In our Russian doll analogy for example,

self-regulation can involve only one doll, or can work like a bucket brigade, wherein each doll’s

self-correcting behaviors serve as feedback signals to nearest neighbors until the perturbation is

distributed and global equilibrium is restored. (Or in our domino analogy, the signal can send the

dominoes falling at any point in the system, but the corrective response can speed them up, slow,

stop and/or reverse them depending upon whether it increases or decreases the initial stimulus.)

This elegant sequential coupling of positive feedback signals with negative feedback

corrections provides the mechanism for self-organizing phase transitions between attractor

regimes of varying stability and complexity that allow adaptive responses to environmental

changes. In this context a feedback cycle occurs during each “not-self” moment of identity

transformation, triggered by any potentially harmful (entropic, self-destructive) or advantageous

(negentropic, self-organizing) electrochemical fluctuation anywhere inside or outside the global

self system. This fluctuation serves as the positive feedback signal wherein in-phase constructive

interference informs the system of a chemical change in the negentropic direction, while out-of-

phase destructive interference speaks of an entropic energy loss from the system. The signal then

triggers its coupled negative feedback correction that prevents or facilitates the change by

invoking the appropriate behavioral regime.

This is where the concepts of positive and negative take an important turn: When out-of-

phase positive feedback is occurring, the self-regulatory signal is negative, and the correction is

inhibitive, reducing the stimulus, reversing the course of change via a repellor regime to preserve

the previous state of self-system. Likewise, when in-phase positive feedback is occurring the

signal is positive and the correction increases the stimulus—perhaps bumping it into a more

complex behavioral regime. In this way positive and negative feedback work together within the

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self system such that the signal-correction functions yield the traditional stimulus-response

behavioral pattern—responses that “drive the system closer to an ideal behavior” (Cinquin &

Demongeot, 2002. (Refer to figure 1.) (Note that the meanings of positive and negative shift from

signal to correction as positive feedback signals triggers negative feedback corrections in the

coupled system—just one example of the many switchbacks within complex feedback circuits I

encountered in tracing the hedonic valence to its core.) From this point forward the terms

“positive and negative” will refer to this thermostatic negative feedback self-regulatory pattern,

specifically connoting its stimulus increasing/decreasing corrective functions and outcomes.

Insert Figure 1 about here

Working together in this manner, the two types of feedback yield “bistable” (Ferrell, 2002)

switch-like responses that dictate digital (either/or) decisions between behavioral regimes. They

yield ongoing oscillations between short-term self-preservationary and self-developmental limit

cycle attractors that together honor the long-term goal of electrochemical—hence identity—

homeostasis. This common feedback pattern serves as a digital language or sorts, roughly

analogous to a computer chip with its digital 0/1 logic, offering simple rules that can beget self-

organizing complexities as impressive as those of our modern electronic technologies. This

distinctive pattern of digital stimulus-response is observable across all levels of self-organizing

complexity from the attraction (+) and repulsion (-) behavior of atoms (as electrons come and go);

the agonizing (+) and antagonizing (-) chemical behavior of cell receptor proteins (as molecules

come and go); the excitatory (+) and inhibitory (-) behavior of cellular membranes and neural

networks (as electrical signals comes and go); to the approach (+) and avoid (-) instinctive and

conditioned behaviors of animals (as sensory stimuli come and go); and all the way to the good

(+) and bad (-) evaluative appraisals of the human mind (as cognitive experiences come and go).

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This simple digital behavioral pattern is that which yields the right number of electrons, elements,

substances, proteins, hormones, in the right places at the right times such that organisms enjoy a

coherent chemical identity, a consistent form and flexible structure, can move about in space,

adapting to ever wider environmental niches and surviving for ever longer periods of time.

Nature’s Evaluative Logic

Herein lies the core self-regulatory logic within natural selection and the fundamental

underpinning for the evaluative positive/negative dichotomy within the emotional sensory system.

Positive emotions (“good” feelings) signal an ongoing change that is good for self-development—

a negentropic not-yet-self adaptive opportunity already being exploited by the body. The positive

emotional category speaks of positive feedback excitative signaling and corrective stimulus

increases that facilitate “morphogenesis” (e.g. Becvar & Becvar, 1996), which creates identity

change and innovation toward dynamic equipotentiality (the most complex strange attractor

regimes covering the broadest territory of cognitive state space). The negative emotional category

concerns negative feedback blocking and stimulus reductions that deliver corrective morphostasis,

in order to preserve system stability. “Bad” feelings carry the message that the body is preventing a

change that could compromise global self-preservation, by invoking a more localized attractor

regime with fewer degrees of collective freedom. In short, the hedonic valence encodes a universal

directive to avoid entropic self-destruction by balancing goals of ongoing self-preservation and

self-development—evolution’s dual selective criteria: survival and adaptation. The hedonic

valence is simply a complex extension of the negentropic biological vacillation between stability

and change, born of the never-ending mechanical dance between construction and destruction of

material form.

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At this point I want to reemphasize that the self-regulatory process is fully automatic—with

no magic, no supernatural designer, or beforehand prescription for the self-organizing patterns

that emerge. The not-yet-self states signaled by positive emotion and the pre-cognitive priming

effects occur simply because any global perception of the signal occurs much later down the line

in the self-regulatory network—after much of the work is already complete in local, relative, and

“earlier” zones of time/space. The key point for our moral discussion however, is that the pattern

of thermostatic feedback correction is directing each local self-system into its optimal goal state—

restoring right states of homeostatic balance in response to any relevant chemical changes

anywhere in the system. Hence moral behavior is inherent within our chemistry, it obeys simple

digital laws, and is fully mechanical. For thus far the self-regulatory process described requires

neither consciousness nor volitional participation whether or not there exists any subjective

sensation of emotional pleasure or pain. Indeed, the fully human sensory process involves the

cognitive level of identity wherein the subjective feeling, part three of the emotional perception

enters the story.

The Evolution of the Emotional Feedback Signal

The mind-body explanation of “panprotopsychic identism” (Rensch, 1971) posits that

consciousness (subjective self-awareness) exists in some potential form in all matter. The

feedback model suggests this is due to the ubiquity of stimulus-response feedback, the chemical

basis of identity, and because the self-regulatory process sets the evolutionary stage for awareness

of self as distinct from one’s not-self environment. Although I would be loathe to speculate about

the subjective experiences of less complex self-units, clearly some form of self-awareness exists

even within single cells. (Witness the routine self/not-self distinctions made by human blood cells

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and the protective actions taken by the immune cells, as well as the emergence of not-yet-self

genetic potentials by a stem cell as it specializes into a given tissue environment.) The crudest life

forms may even experience some hedonic sensitivity given that “appetitive” behavior toward food

and away from danger is observable even in the single celled ameba (Medicus, 1987). Clearly at

some evolutionary juncture, however, the feedback signal became perceivable as an actual feeling

—a feeling coinciding with the body’s mechanical self-correcting behavior. Perhaps akin to a

simple reflexive bodily startle, this first flash of cognitive awareness may be an ancient

predecessor to the modern bivalent emotion of surprise. Indeed, it has been suggested that

emotion gives rise to a core “proto-self” consciousness by informing us of the “feeling of what is

happening” (Damasio, 1999), to which I would add: “the feeling of a self-relevant identity change

that is happening…. to me”, (and that an updated Cartesian cogito might be: “I feel therefore I

am”). It also seems likely that the equilibrium requirement would also influence the subjective

experience, bringing awareness of the feedback signal’s digital dimension with a feeling

conceptually akin to discordant dizziness or concordant, rhythmic, harmonious flow (perhaps an

ancient precursor to both kinesthetic and vestibular proprioception). This perception carries the

ancient moral message: “When I am in balance, this is right” (a corrective prescription which

manifests in humans as “cognitive dissonance” (Festinger, 1957), although I prefer recasting it as

emotional dissonance.) It also sets the stage for emotional resonance as pleasurable with the

hedonic dictate: “Flow events are good”.

Hedonic Perceptions & Feed-forward Conditioning

Perhaps coincidently with the evolution of somatic and other sensory modalities, the

feedback signal evolved its fully hedonic dimension allowing experiences to be divided neatly

into pleasure/pain schematic categories linked to body’s digital response pattern—ushering

conditioned learning and long-term knowledge about right/wrong states of balance. (Indeed, I

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suspect that the coupling of parts one and two of the emotional perception have long been the

unsung hero in both classical and operant conditioning—Pavlov’s “unconditioned” stimulus-

response pair.) I align this highly adaptive evolutionary milestone with the neural level of

identity complexity (aka the “synaptic self” (LeDoux, 2002), whether through simple nerve nets

or complex brains the add-on feature of neural plasticity ushered feed-forward enhancements that

allow the organism to act before the fact, dramatically increasing the global degrees of freedom

within the system. This expanded the role of the hedonic feedback signal to serve as a reminder of

harmful or advantageous events and offer instantaneous detection of “trouble” or “opportunity”

(Damasio, 2003, p 36) in the environment—with very little sensory or neural complexity

required. (Witness the roles of feedback in neural habituation and sensitization in conditioned

withdrawal behavior of simple sea slugs (e.g. Aplysia; Kalat, 1992; pp 512; Dale, Schacher, &

Kandel, 1988). In humans, the neural relationship between the amygdala, hippocampus, and

orbitofrontal cortex illustrates the role of emotion in conditioning and encoding novel information

into new memories. Given its ancient self-regulatory function, this is particularly true of

“behavioral rules for moving directionally through space” (Muller & Kubie, 1989) and when said

movement is “self-directed” (Foster, Castro, & McNaughton, 1989).

This neural identity enhancement also ushered the earliest evaluative appraisals of distress

(“stress”) and eustress (Selye, 1956) perhaps the first fully egoistic—good for me/bad for me—

component of emotional feelings. (As do I, Selye equated stress with change, although the word

has since become synonymous with negative distress). This final cognitive link brought full

awareness of the approach/avoid behavioral regimes relative to specific sorts of environmental

circumstances, adding conscious motivational themes to the ancient mechanics—ushering

operant behavioral conditioning and cementing the regulatory role of volition in the self-

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organizing process. Or, put another way, the hedonic cues brought awareness of the self as an

active player in one’s life and the adaptive ability to distinguish between a cooperative “win-win”

environmental climate and a competitive “win-lose game” (Seligman, 2002, p 30-31). The moral

message then became: Distress is bad for my self-preservation and I must correct-to-protect by

avoiding pain eliciting objects or locales. Likewise, eustress is good for my adaptive self-

development and I can correct-to-grow by approaching that which elicits pleasure.

The Emergence of Mind & The Evolution of Feeling Tones

The emergence of neural networks gave rise to the cognitive level of identity—the mind,

which opens all new realms of self-development with its capacity to learn through iterative cycles

of trial and error feedback. (In fact, the affect attunement and emotional sensory exchanges

between caregiver and infant play a central role the ego individuation process itself (Mahler, Pine,

& Bergman, 1975). However, in humans (and perhaps other primates), as cognitive development

proceeds the emotional sensory signal takes on an added level of specific information about both

the person and their environment. Indeed, the final evolution of the feedback signal takes place

within one’s individual ontogenic development—becoming more complex as one “grows up”.

For example, the newborn exhibits a bivalent startle reflex to both eustress and distress, then in a

process likened to learned “flavor appreciation” (Izard, 1984), the simple positive and negative

feeling signals become experience dependent (Greenough, 1986) and entangled within semantic

associations (Bower, 1981). This process results in the emergence of egoistic and/or social

cognitive identity constructs as well as specific feeling tones similar to the sensory tones of color

or sound—part three of the human emotional perception. These are the basic and universal

feelings of joy, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust (Ekman, 1973; Plutchick, 1984; Tomkins 1984;

Bertocci, 1988), which are evident in the distinct facial expressions of infants by six months of

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age (Izard, 1971). These feeling tones offer a second evaluative dimension in addition to the

ancient hedonic valence, one relating to the egotistic identity constructs and providing what is

known as the cognitive appraisal (i.e., Arnold, 1945; Zajonc, 1980, 1984; Lazarus, 1982, 1991,

Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001). These tones inform the mind about what the body is doing

and why. This basic group of feeling tones has also been referred to as drive discharge affects

(Engel, 1963); outcome dependent emotions (Graham & Weiner, 1986); and general purpose

emotions (Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988). As sensory bearers of newly pertinent information,

they contain egoistic appraisals of impact, interestingness, globality, uncertainty, responsibility,

and relevance (Frijda, 1987).

Then these basic feeling tones become intermixed like the primary colors on an artist’s

palate as schematic “assimilation and accommodation” processes occur (Piaget, 1952) in response

to each dissonant (or resonant) experience. They evolve into secondary cognitive blends and

shades offering a third layer of self-regulatory information relating to the socio-cultural identity,

while still retaining all other encoded layers as well. Complex feelings include such recognizable

emotional experiences as: contentment, trust, mistrust, confidence, doubt, shame, guilt, pride,

respect, appreciation, remorse, gratitude, resentment, shame, envy, hope, love, and hate. They

have also been called: complex emotions (Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988), attribution

dependent emotions (Graham & Weiner, 1986), and signal scanning affects (Engel, 1963.) Given

their personalized nature, they are subject to many levels of analysis in space and time (see

Rosenberg, 1998), and they have specific appraisal themes (i.e., certainty, controllability,

accessibility, self-esteem, modifiability, manageability, and time reference, Frijda, 1987). They

exhibit many differences in antecedent events, event coding, cognitive appraisals, patterns of

expression, etc. (Mesquita, & Frijda 1992); they are socially constructed, and culturally diverse,

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lending credence to the notion that emotion is “unnatural” (Lutz, 1988). In sum, the cognitive

appraisal offers an intrapersonal sensory bridge of circumstantial regulatory evidence that links

mind-self via the body-self to the world and all its physical and socio-cultural environmental

conditions. But specifically, the basic feelings relate to body-self (toward preserving the atomic,

genetic, and neural identity constructs), while complex feelings relate to mind-self (toward

developing the purely cognitive egoistic and socio-cultural identity constructs). Plus, in its latest

evolutionary manifestation, objective exchanges of emotional behavioral expressions (positive or

negative facial expressions, nonverbal postures, vocal tones, and approach/avoid actions) create a

secondary social layer of external environmental stimulus cues (i.e. emotional “contagion” and

“comparison”, Bartel & Saavedra, 2000; Barsade, 2003), further extending the self-regulatory

network to the interpersonal mind-to-mind level of self-organization.

Throughout this evolutionary progression, the ancient two-step (self-environment)

behavioral feedback cycle has expanded into a five-step cycle in humans that integrates each level

of self-organization within the body, the body with world, the mind with body, and minds with

other minds. As such, contemporary emotional sensory messages bear meaning at each step in

the following iterative feedback cycle: Complex feelings guide the mind’s conditioned 1) motives,

which beget, 2) actions (volitional behaviors) which beget 3) outcome events (humanly

influenced environmental changes), which beget a new round of the body’s 4) basic emotional

evaluations (the original feedback signal), and 5) either autopilot or mindful behavioral

corrections…repeating ad infinitum. (See Figure 2).

Insert figure two about here

Summary

So finally, we can answer our first question: Where do emotional messages come from? The

complete answer is that they come from here, there, and everywhere, cycling within and between

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all material self-units and their relative environment—born of fundamental electrochemical

feedback activity and fostering self-regulation, behavioral communication, and reciprocal

adaptation. They are complex integrated sensory perceptions of ancient self-organizing dynamics

and stimulus-response mechanics that underlie both the subconscious and volitional patterns of

human motivation. (Indeed, identifying the ongoing mind-body interactions as sequential steps

within the feedback cycle, unites the biological (Tinbergen, 1989), the cognitive (Zimmerman &

Schunk, 1989), the social (Geen, Beatty & Arkin, 1984) and emotional (Petri, 1986) factors of

motivation under the umbrella of sensory behavioral regulation.) Subjective human emotional

messages unite the body and mind in coherent, adaptive harmony with the physical world.

Objective emotional behavioral expressions add yet another link in the self-organizing chain,

facilitating integration, negotiation, and harmony at the social level.

What Do Emotional Messages Mean?

Having established their ancient self-regulatory source, just what exactly do human

emotional messages mean? What information does part three, the feeling tone, of the emotional

message bear? The feedback model allows us to address this question by looking at what kind of

internal and external environmental conditions make humans uniformly feel good or bad. And the

answers must make sense of the common appraisal themes within both primary and complex

feeling categories as well as the core digital feedback language encoded within the hedonic

valence. Although the traditional concept of “appraisal” entangles the physiological and cognitive

processes, this fractal approach separates the body/mind identity structures and functions,

shedding light upon three distinct dimensions of meaning encoded within each feeling perception.

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The first, which relates to the body’s innate atomic, genetic, and neural identity constructs

and to the fundamental chemical environmental changes, I call evaluative utility. The second

offers judgmental utility, delivering information concerning the conscious mind’s learned egoistic

and socio-cultural identity constructs. Third, is the moral utility, concerning the optimal

integration of the first two, which allows access to the trove of universal moral wisdom available

within the emotional sense. (As we proceed, keep in mind the preliminary nature of this

discussion, the meager level of our emotional literacy, and its linguistic consequences. I will be

redefining what constitutes a feeling tone pursuant to the feedback roles, but also utilizing the

introspective backdrop of my own, perhaps genetically freakish, emotional sensibility and I

encourage readers to draw upon personal experiences as well. Indeed, morality theorists have

referred to “implicit perception” (Bruner, 1960), “embodied cognition” (Lakoff, 1987), the

“momentary intuitive response” (Galotti, 1989), “the automatic moral intuitions” (Haidt, 2001a);

and in a survey of the most important sources of moral authority a whopping 74% chose

“personal experience” over God’s word at 21%; and religious leaders or modern science at 2%

each (Loges & Kidder, 1997).

Evaluative Utility within Basic Feelings

The first meaning dimension, the evaluative utility, captures the fundamental biological

meaning to be found within emotional messages, offering the only mechanically constrained

(hence, most universally valid) value guidance. Evaluative information is available when feelings

are used as a sense, relevant to the person perceiving them, valid the moment they are experienced

(step 4 of the Figure 2 cycle) and pertinent only to the immediate environmental circumstances—

just like sensory colors, sounds, and smells. Evaluative utility is universal, concerning

right/balanced states of nature, the body’s multi-tiered chemical identity, its regulatory dynamics,

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needs and purposes, and the self-relevant conditions for meeting them in the local environment.

Evaluative utility is delivered through the hedonic valence and its coupled digital behavior (parts

one and two of the perception). Pleasure, attraction, and approach concern adaptive self-

development, while pain, repulsion, and avoidance concern self-preservation—the two right and

good life-giving imperatives.

The most meaning-rich evaluative utility, however, is to be found in the appraisal themes of

the five basic feelings: joy, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust—which offer the specifics about

optimal and deficit self-organizing states. These feeling tones bear information about the body’s

biologically preset parameters (like the thermostatic settings) against which the feedback

comparisons are made—valuable electrochemical requirements of all inner doll identity

constructs, best described as needs. (In Pavlovian language innate needs are the unconditioned

stimulus that yield the hardwired behavioral responses and conditioned motivational urges.) The

core needs concern maintaining physiological homeostasis (the biological requirements for

oxygen, water, food, warmth, sleep, movement, behavioral adaptation, and procreation) and the

deficit or opportune environmental conditions in which they are met. They are largely mediated

through the hedonic drives to increase pleasure and decrease pain, such that a comfortable state of

balance is maintained. But at the outer-doll level of mind and its cognitive feedback loop to the

external environment, these core requirements manifest as a higher-level set of psychological

motivational needs that are encoded within the feeling tones themselves. Although a consensual

taxonomy is yet to emerge, there is convergent data supporting two broad primary and secondary

need classes (Darwin, 1871; Murray, 1938; Klinger, 1977; Wright, 1984; Insko, 1985; De Waal,

1989; Heaven, 1990), which the feedback model suggests relate to the dual self-organizing

imperatives. In this context, the appraisal information within the five basic emotions evidences a

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two-tiered hierarchical arrangement of six universal psychosocial needs similar to Maslow (1970)

—all of which must be met on an ongoing basis for optimal self-regulation. However, the

dynamics of protective distress suggest that nature has afforded the self-preservationary needs top

priority. Indeed, four out of the five basic emotions are negatively valenced, for nature is much

more specific about the external conditions that are universally “wrong”—those that disrupt the

ancient self-organizing processes and balances.

Primary Self-Preservationary Needs

The first tier consists of two primary self-preservationary needs, which are protectively

regulated by the four basic emotional pains. The need for freedom (the ability to move about, to

access environmental stimulus and physical need-meeting resources), and the need for power (the

ability to respond, to behave flexibly, adaptively, autonomously, and effectively; to have agency

or personal control.) These two fundamental needs safeguard the body’s self-regulatory

imperative (for indeed the individual self-unit is always the proximate unit of evolution). They

interact conceptually in the term “liberty” and underlie notions of human rights, social justice, and

public trust. They also equate with Maslow’s need for safety/security, as the non-negotiable

conditions necessary for the individual’s psychological survival within any self-organized group.

Hence, emotional pain will deliver its correct-to-protect distress message if either need is

frustrated, with the tone informing us of specific types of deficit circumstances—the

environmental repellors that thwart the need-meeting effort, the destructive interference patterns

within the local environment.

Basic distress signals specifically ask us to protect ourselves from: 1. Losses (sadness) of

basic energy, and need-meeting commodities, relationships, or opportunities; 2. Threats (fear) of

bodily harm, or to rightful control or safe security; and 3. Unwholesome, naturally offensive

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(disgust) comestibles, commodities, or conditions, all three of which invoke the repellent “flight”

action tendency, a “moving away” (Horney, 1945) in protective avoidance of that which is not

right for us. And lastly, to protect ourselves against: 4. Unjust obstructions, violations, and

inequities (anger) via its antagonistic “fight” defensive reaction, a “moving against” any

perceived obstacle to one’s rightful agency, liberty, and need-meeting efforts. (Anger, perhaps the

newest of the basic emotions, emerges coincidentally with social cooperation on the evolutionary

stage evidenced at the primate level, perhaps born of a blend of play and mating instincts in

mammals. Anger is perhaps also akin to disgust, wherein innate unwholesomeness extends to the

social sphere. Since social networks cannot be escaped, anger offers a special blend of both

approach/avoid motions, wherein passionately aggressive battles for individual freedom or power

yield consensually just social rules, structures, and roles. Anger also begins to merge both poles

of the hedonic valence affording it a unique motivating power—wherein retaliation or venting of

any kind feels good.) In sum, the evaluative motivational theme within the primary need tier is

one of emotional pain relief and negative feedback corrections, which protect the body (one’s

atomic, genetic, and neural identity structures) until the mind (one’s egoistic and social identity

structures) develops to offer optimal participation in the self-regulatory process.

Secondary Self-Developmental Needs

The pursuit of emotional pleasure as it own reward occurs largely in the secondary tier,

which concerns the dynamics of cognitive self-development, as well as the cultural evolution of

the species. This secondary tier holds four higher needs for: connection (viz., belonging, group

membership, to love and be loved); esteem (to be accountable, worthy, productive, valuable, and

lovable); creativity (to actively express one’s unique talents, novel imagination, and skills, to

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discover, engineer or reproduce life-enhancing resources); and meaning (to extract long-term

significance from life events, and actualize one’s highest potentials).

Although something feels wanting when these secondary needs are unmet, they are

regulated largely by eustress and positive feedback corrections. They underlie the “moving

toward” and “moving with” motivational themes within the basic feeling of joy—the hedonic

grandmother of all complex positive feelings—bearing her correct-to-grow message. Joy is the

seductress that pulls the mind from the subconscious pain-reducing activities of the lower tier,

amplifying awareness of optimums that the mind can then recreate of its own volition. Joy

expands our cognitive state space and offers bifurcations from simple repetitive attractor regimes

into the strange attractors that afford us a much broader range of identity and behavioral freedom.

Joy constitutes a general, multipurpose theme of free flow that is both reinforcing and intriguing,

reflecting the positive feedback correction of increasing the stimulus conditions, to “broaden and

build” (Fredrickson, 1998) the conscious mind and the social sphere. Unlike distress, which is

more universally constrained, eustress is personally negotiable and culturally flexible, linked with

one’s genetic propensities and the virtually unlimited cultural conditions under which they can

emerge and flourish. Joy’s broad appraisal theme speaks of not-yet-self moments of negentropic

change, attracting us toward need-meeting resources, adaptive opportunities, symbiotic

relationships, and magnetically retaining them in the mind as “good”. Joy urges us to explore, to

play, to find comfort, to bond and nurture; to wonder over nature’s mystery and patterned

symmetry, and to take delight in novel cognitive connections and new experiences. Momentary

joy will linger with optimal self-development, taking up permanent resonance in the emerging

mindscape through her complex shades and blends. As such, joy serves all four higher needs by

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developing the mind, broadening the cognitive identity boundaries and expanding the empathic

range of the social identity as one adapts to an ever-broader environmental niche.

However, joy—and mindful volition—are perhaps most intimately associated with the need

for connection. Joy validates the internal and external connections that reflect the cooperative

slaving or long-term constructive interference between self and other, the ever-expanding network

connections that yield evermore complex identity gestalts. The threshold into the higher needs tier

(and successful social cohesion) rests upon sufficient emotional connection and coherence

between body and mind—which is contingent upon the person’s ability to resolve basic distress

signals to some minimal degree. (Indeed, in group dynamics optimal social “connectivity”

depends on an optimal ratio of positive and negative emotion or the interactions will quickly fall

into an ineffective limiting attractor, Losada, 1999.) For due to the survival priority, eustress

always takes the back seat to protective distress. Anger and other pains will sweep in like a wet

blanket, jolting the mind from its comforting habits, tabling all higher needs, temporarily severing

social bonds, and momentarily silencing all positive feelings, should the body’s non-negotiable

needs for personal freedom and power be compromised.

The Lower-Tier Bodily Safeguards

Indeed, there are elegant physiological safeguards within the emotional system that ensure

that the emerging mind will not be allocated any more volitional control than it can handle

adaptively. Whenever the mind misses its protective feedback cue, the encoded message will

simply be conditioned into the memory increasing both the frequency and the intensity of the

painful signal in similar future events—shouting the ever-louder message that one has “exceeded

one’s adaptive resources” (Lazarus, 1977). Just like the thermostat that shuts off the heat, when a

critical intensity level of pain is breeched the body will override the mind’s volition marshaling its

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reflexive approach and avoid auto-corrections—simply removing the mind from the self-

regulatory loop. This remarkable safeguard is evident in the dual “low road and high road”

(LeDoux & Phelps, 2000) emotional information processing routes through the ancient amygdala

pathway and straight to reflexive behaviors, or the more circuitous, cognitively involved, route

through the prefrontal cortex. At present, this bypass is considered to be a bad thing (e.g the

“amygdala hijack”, Goleman, 1995), for it limits the human to the simple approach/avoid

behavioral repertoire of the lesser neurally endowed. However, from the sensory perspective, such

a conservative bypass is a very good thing. The body must retain its protective authority, for the

mind is a newfangled evolutionary add-on, a liberal maverick that can learn the wrong stuff—and

garbage in produces garbage out. (The mind’s relatively unbridled abilities to harbor maladaptive

information, attitudes, strategies, and/or compulsions are well documented. The mind can filter,

skew, and distort perception and judgment (e.g., Tversky & Kanhenman (1974), offer perilous

intuitional knowledge (Myers, 2002), and even reinvent memory (Loftus, 1993). At the social

level, cloistered groupthink can occur, and even too much unwarranted positive emotion can lead

to “Pollyannaish” ineffectiveness (Losada & Heaphy, 2003). Indeed, without the body’s vital

evaluative tether the mind can foul the self-regulatory works curtailing self-development,

compromising self-preservation, and facilitating self-destruction.

In sum, the evaluative meaning dimension offers universal self-regulatory information

contained within the hedonic valence, the action tendencies, and the appraisal themes of the five

basic emotions: joy, fear, anger, sadness and disgust. Evaluative utility is available upon

subjective introspection and objective observation and offers common empathic meaning across

humanity. Evaluative utility elucidates how the basic sensory signals provide a cognitive link

between external environmental conditions (whether physical or sociocultural) and an internal,

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two-tiered set of six universal human needs that mediate the dual self-organizing imperatives.

Evaluative utility is nature’s collective self-regulatory wisdom encoded within the body, an ever-

present global synthesis of local self-correcting activity across neural, genetic, and atomic levels.

It offers the core self-regulatory “whys” within the feeling of what is happening in the “here and

now” moment. But the evaluative utility will also carry forth within all secondary shades and

blends of complex feeling tones—wherein we find the next meaning dimension, relating to the

cognitive identity realm.

Judgmental Utility and Appraisal Themes within Complex Feelings

The second meaning dimension offers judgmental utility, which concerns all the learned

mental constructs related to the mind (i.e., the egoistic and socio-cultural identity constructs; all

knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and volitional need-meeting strategies.) Unlike its universal

counterpart, judgmental utility is highly subjective, personal, symbolic, relative, contextual,

arbitrary, and less accessible by direct social observation. (In Pavlovian language the judgmental

meaning dimension relates to the conditioned stimulus cues within emotional perceptions. In the

language of dynamics, the judgmental meaning dimension relates to the cognitive attractor

patterns that constrain neural network behavior.) Hence, judgmental utility addresses the mind’s

long-term good or bad value judgments—which can become arbitrarily conditioned to people,

places, and things, and often passed between generations as cultural memes (Dawkins, 1989) if

not “viruses of the mind” (Brody, 1996). As evaluative utility is to universality and nature,

judgmental utility is to individual and cultural diversity, and nurture.

The Judgmental Utility Within Complex Feelings

Fortunately, judgmental utility is easy to find and decode. It resides within the complex

feelings (i.e. trust, mistrust, envy, admiration, love, hate, etc.), and can be found at every other

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step of the feedback cycle except the in-the-moment evaluation (as noted in Figure 2). As subtle

shades and blends of their primary parents, complex feelings still carry the basic evaluative

appraisals (relating to all six needs), but their added specificity addresses the quality and quantity

of the mind’s developmental status: its awareness of the body’s regulatory needs and processes,

the relevance of environmental conditions, as well as the empathic parameters of its self-concept

and the adaptive quality of its habitual need-meeting strategies. Judgmental utility speaks of the

mind’s specific holdings, offering the who, what, where, details to the whys of the evaluative

dimension, but from a broadened time perspective of “there and then” both past and future. As

such, complex feelings add distinguishing cognitive characteristics such as relational complexity

(who and what the situation involves, and where and when it occurs); the accountability

attribution, also called responsibility, agency, or culpability (who or what is assigned as the main

stimulus or cause of the event); a broadened empathic range in connected social space (who or

what is taken within the socio-cultural identity constructs, wherein “your interests are factored

into my feeling signals”), and the specificity of the implied action tendency (who or what is

attractive or repulsive, worthy of approach and attachment or of avoidance or expulsion.)

Given the role of conditioning, complex feelings also carry a hydraulic-like quality, wherein

they can build in memory until vented or released. They carry a weak to strong range of emotional

“charge” or motivational power in local space that directly relates to a short term/long term

temporal range in time (i.e., fleeting, after-the-fact joy gives rise to present moment trust which

builds a durable future hope, and ultimately can yield an unshakably timeless faith; or a flash of

unresolved anger could breed lingering resentment, hostile contempt, and eventually a volatile

rage.) Complex feelings also offer social referencing information about one’s adjudicated value in

the context of the hierarchical social structure (i.e., people look up to others in admiration or

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gratitude, or down upon others in contempt or pity.) Pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, regret,

and remorse reflect dissonance between one’s social persona and egoistic identity and signal a

vertical shift pursuant to a gain or loss in self-esteem. Finally, complex feelings offer information

about one’s interpersonal strategy whether protectively competitive (win-lose) or

developmentally cooperative (win-win) (i.e., mistrust versus trust, envy versus admiration,

resentment versus gratitude, contempt versus compassion.) Judgmental utility can be found in all

valenced mental holdings, all long-term attitudes, and any feelings that the mind can conjure

without any direct environmental stimulus.

To summarize, all emotional sensory messages are right, good, and meaning-rich. The more

basic the feeling, the more momentarily salient, biological, and universally valid its informational

message. The more complex, the more experientially tailored, cognitive, and cultural information

it contains, and the more it concerns the mind’s long-term judgmental and behavioral strategies.

As basic emotions deliver evaluative meaning about the adaptive status of the body, about nature,

and the adaptive quality of the physical and sociocultural landscape, the judgmental utility within

lingering complex feelings relates to nurture and culture, and evaluates the adaptive quality of the

mindscape.

Moral Utility

The third meaning dimension encoded within each feeling, which I call moral utility, is

central to our discussion. This is where we mine the optimal “how to” guidance about right or

wrong uses of free will (the implicit goal of all cultural ethics—to foster right behavioral choices.)

The moral meaning springs from the interactive symbiosis of both the evaluative and judgmental

dimensions. It is a simple assessment of how well the mind’s “good/bad” ideologies are tailored

to the body’s “right/wrong” homeodynamic regulatory physics—a good fit is right and offers

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optimal choices, a bad fit is wrong and exposes lingering self-regulatory dysfunction and misuses

of volition.

The emotional sense offers a three-fold moral prescription which hinges upon the

fundamental difference between basic and complex feelings and the core corrective feedback

functions of reducing negative and increasing positive stimulus conditions. First, the positive and

negative valence delivers a universal moral code akin to the negative version of the “golden rule”,

concerning the reduction of all conditions that elicit basic pain and the increase of any that foster

complex emotional pleasure. Second, basic feelings are asking for behavioral changes that

correctively alter the landscape—avoiding or eliminating deficit conditions (unwholesome

threats, losses, and obstacles) that “should not” exist, and maximizing positive opportunities,

resources and connections that “should” exist—by biological decree. And third, complex feelings

are asking for corrections to the mindscape and the should/should not messages are quite black

and white: Judgments and motivations with a positive valence and an approach direction are

good, the more complexly positive the emotional tone, the more right the belief, thought, or action

—and cultural meme, structure, or tradition—that is associated with it. Conversely, pre-judgments

and motivations that carry a negative valence are bad, and the more complexly negative the

emotional tone, the more wrong and in need of corrective revision the associated schemata. In

short, humans are optimally self-organizing—rightly moral—when thinking and acting using

positive judgments and actively choosing right responses that replace the fight and flight auto-

corrections. This involves correctively righting oneself in answer to each complex feeling—by

cultivating and enhancing the optimal cognitive schemata and finding, purging, and replacing the

deficits that elicit the complex pains. It involves righting the world in answer to the five basic

feelings—corrective development of one’s cultural and natural environment by creating

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cooperative networks, need-meeting opportunities and resources, and actively eliminating the

conditions that elicit the universal pains.

The moral utility offered within the emotional sense is nothing new. This natural code of

ethics is evident within the emotional milestones of Erickson’s (1968) stage model of

psychosocial development, within Kohlberg’s highest stage of moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1967)

and within an optimal level of “emotional intelligence” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990; Goleman,

1995). Our innate ethics also echoes the universal virtues and values recently identified by the

Institute for Global Ethics (Loges & Kidder, 1996), the positive psychology Values-In-Action

taxonomy of human strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), and it resonates from within the

cutting edge well-being advice across the mental and physical health sciences. It is also reflected

in the common sense empathic intuitions that we think of as the moral conscience. For example,

notice the intuitive difference in implied approach/avoid behavior between feelings of admiration

and envy, compassion and contempt, confidence and shame, gratitude and resentment, love and

hate, honor and guilt, hope and despair, and how they strengthen or weaken esteem or social

connection, and offer ethical if not “spiritual” meaning. Indeed, when laundered of all

supernatural assumptions and cultural trappings, spirituality reduces empirically to the objective

(animating) and subjective (evaluative and guiding) manifestations of the emotional sense. And

once the sensory messages within pain and pleasure are disentangled from the good/evil

dichotomy, nature’s right/wrong ethics echoes the common moral wisdom across the great

philosophical and spiritual traditions—all of which flow from the complex positive emotions (e.g.

The Divine Virtues of Western religious tradition: Love, Faith, Kindness, Humility, Generosity,

Zeal, Temperant self-control; each either a positive emotion or the empathic understandings and

optimal self-regulatory behaviors they bring.)

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 Emotional Sense 38

The worst of our traditional moral advice springs from the idea that emotion itself is

evidence of “original sin” (e.g. five of “Seven Deadly Sins” are emotions: pride, wrath, envy,

greed, lust), and the companion assumption that divinity and moral virtue harkens only from

supernatural realms. With this assumption morality—and all forms of behavioral control—

becomes vested in external regulatory authorities, which negates personal empowerment, limits

freedom, and confounds the biological self-regulatory mechanisms. Our standard moral fare

suggests that social conformity, obedience and “selflessness” are virtuous, while the “selfishness”

of human hedonism becomes something to loathe and suppress in oneself and in others. However,

both selfishness and selflessness are underdeveloped cognitive strategies—unbalanced states of

self-regulatory distress that invite even more negative emotional signals. Indeed, our standard

moral approaches are based upon profound misunderstandings and abuses of the protective pains,

to which I will devote the remainder of the discussion. For now, I offer the following summary

reference chart of the three interactive meaning dimensions encoded within the feeling tones (see

Figure 3), which demonstrates how the emotional sense offers a simple, straightforward, and

universal moral compass.

Insert Figure 3 about here

The Fundamental Attribution Error

Unfortunately, humanity has largely missed the boat on our ancient sensory guidance. Given

the aversive power of negative emotions even scientists who acknowledge some sensory function

still suggest that emotion is bad stuff (witness the cover headlines of Discover magazine:

“Primitive brain senses emotion….Neuroscientists explore ways to keep emotions from hijacking

the mind”, Johnson, 2003). We have made the fundamental attribution error of blaming the

messenger and missed the crucial self-regulatory message. We have chosen to deny and

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suppressively regulate—even medicate—the feelings themselves, overlooking the environmental

conditions they are asking us to change. Suppression reflects an inaccurate top-down (mind-to-

body-to-world) information processing and behavioral control model, when all evolutionary,

regulatory, and sensory systems are organized from the bottom up (world-to-body-to-mind).

Although the mind can deceive itself and pretend that an emotion is not occurring, it can never

outsmart the body’s predominant self-regulatory dynamics, for its defensive safeguards will

simply over-ride volition, narrow the breadth of consciousness, and intensify its distress signals

until the mind “gets it” and aligns with them. In fact, with the strategy of suppression (and such

platitudes as “suffering is good for the soul”) we have accomplished just the opposite of the

negative feedback correction—we have substantially increased the painful stimulus!

Indeed, the most shocking revelation from the feedback model is that complex negative

feelings need never have emerged, had we correctively utilized the sensory information within the

basic distress signals early on—in our species evolutionary history as well as in individual

psychosocial development. (As in a six-month-old, the full range of basic emotions is evidenced

at least as far back as the primate level, along with a “tit-for-tat” cooperative moral ethic mediated

by anger and complex trust (Trivers, 1985). Instead, we have inadvertently sullied our

sociocultural environment with a spurious man-made layer of complex pain by embracing the

inevitability if not “normalcy” of such feelings as mistrust, shame, contempt, envy, guilt, rage,

and hate.

Perhaps worse yet, we have pressed all the excess man-made pain into moral service.

Instead of using emotional perceptions to regulate our own behavior in alignment with nature’s

simple rules, we routinely use them to manipulate the emotional behavior of others in an odd

third-party form of morality. We express our negative emotions at those who “cause” our pain in

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order to manipulate them into conforming to our particular ethical rules. For example, social

expressions of contempt, anger, and disgust have been linked with conformity to ethical codes of

community (local social mores and laws), autonomy (human rights), and divinity (religious

doctrine), respectively (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, (1999). But the feedback model predicts

that punitive emotional expressions are far more likely to backfire, given the safeguarding

functions and dynamics of negative emotion. For the sensory paradigm suggests that these third-

party expressions only succeed to the degree that they instill first-party feelings in the recipient

such as shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment, sadness, or fear and gain submissive

compliance by harnessing their coupled withdrawal “flight” behaviors. However, given the self-

preservationary priority, these same expressions are perhaps even more likely to elicit anger or

disgust (and/or complex resentment, contempt, rage, and hate) in the recipient instead, along with

the fight response, aggressive non-compliance, and retaliative vengeance leveled back upon the

sender. Thus, third party morality sets in motion a self-perpetuating downward spiral of cyclic

threat, disconnection, pain, self-defense, and reciprocal infighting—a socially self-destructive, yet

historically evident, pattern of human behavior that has compromised the developmental

imperative and created the illusion of evil within our nature. This pattern is the exact opposite of

the “upward spiral” of growth and thriving that results from reciprocal cycles of positive emotion

(Fredrickson, 2003), the evolving cooperative complexity that nature preferentially selects.

Indeed, many of our common parenting practices may even promote deficit psychosocial

outcomes (i.e. milestones marked by mistrust, shame, and guilt; Erickson, 1968) by utilizing

punitive approaches that scuttle innate efforts toward autonomous self-empowerment and

impeach—if not pervert—the emotional guidance system. In fact, an early pattern of violent

40
 Emotional Sense 41

subjugation and the accompanying self-effacing feelings of shame and humiliation mark the first

step in the creation of dangerous violent criminals (Athens, 1992).

The evolutionary result of emotional suppression is that the species remains limited to

struggles for basic power and freedom that thwart the emergence of public trust, weaken social

bonds, squander positive intrinsic motivations, frustrate higher needs, and stifle self-organizing

development at every turn. We have wrongly carried forward a mixture of outdated primate social

strategies (i.e., hierarchical dominance and submission, punishment, sum-zero competition,

territoriality, and deception), and we remain largely limited to Kohlberg’s three lowest stages of

moral reasoning. Indeed, we now suffer an overly narrow range of social self-identity (civil war or

nationalism despite ecological, technological, and economic global interdependence); a narrow

empathic range (racism, sexism, classism, and anthropomorphism versus humanitarian equality

and respect for the interconnected self-organizing web of life); a lack of moral maturity (third party

morality, negative motivations, and situational ethics; versus universal self-regulated, positive

motivations, and empathic virtue); and conflicting motives, ethics, and values (religious “holy

war” versus universal spiritual guidance). Furthermore, our self-perpetuating exchanges of

complex negative emotion subject our bodies to far more chronic regulatory distress than they

have evolved to handle. Something is indeed very wrong—we have handicapped ourselves by

suppressing our most fundamental sensory ally.

Conclusion

Although human emotion cannot be explained within the boundaries of traditional

psychological territory, when viewed from a feedback perspective it can be recognized as a primal

sensory system, serving the biological function of evaluative self-regulatory behavioral adaptation.

Although the positive and negative hedonic valence remains entangled within the good-evil

41
 Emotional Sense 42

dichotomy of the religious lexicon, it is traceable to fundamental self-regulatory feedback

dynamics, which mediate an ongoing balance between two right and good self-organizing

imperatives within natural selection: self-preservation and self-development. As such, emotion

offers a natural, universal, and yet-to-be harnessed behavioral guidance system—an innate,

species-wide moral compass.

The sequence of events that began September 11th, 2001, underscores the urgent need for

humanity to identify global ethical principles—to discover, embrace, and exploit nature’s

universal moral and spiritual guidance. As scripture suggests, humans have bitten of the fruit from

“the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17), severing our connection with nature’s

evaluative wisdom and are suffering the hellish consequences. But as natural bearers of ancient

sensory messages, our hedonic masters of pleasure and pain are hardly the source of our suffering

—indeed, they offer our only salvation from it.

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 Emotional Sense 43

*Situation at start *Situation at start (either/or)

In-phase Explosion/Excitation
(+ + + + + +)
* Stimulus reduction/Repellor regime
(- - - - - -)

Equilibrium
* Goal
(Equilibrium)

Out-of-phase Blocking/Inhibition
(- - - - - -) Stimulus increase/Attractor regime
* (+ + + + + +)
Time Time

Positive Feedback Negative Feedback

Exponential growth & divergent Behavior Maintenance of equilibrium & convergence
(Serves as digital feedback signal) (Feedback correction; preventing/facilitating change)

Figure 1.
The two types of feedback that couple together in self-regulatory feedback systems and
remain encoded within parts one and two of the emotional perception.
(Adapted from de Rosnay, 1997)

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 Emotional Sense 44

Motive ⇒ Action ⇒ Outcome ⇒ Evaluation ⇒ Correction

(Mind) (Mind ) (Mind) (Body) (Body→ Mind)
Complex feelings Basic feeling signals

Figure 2. The Emotional Feedback Cycle

(Mind-body roles and feeling signals in the five-step cycle)

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 Emotional Sense 45

Evaluative Utility Judgmental Utility

(Genes/Body/Nature) (Artifacts of Mind;
Insert Memes/Nurture/Culture)
Charts

References
Basic Feelings Complex - Shades Complex - Blends

Distress (-/Avoid):
(“Reduce the stimulus”)
Fear
(Threat)
Sadness
(Loss)
Anger
(Injustice, inequity)
Disgust
(Unwholesomeness)
MORAL UTILITY:
Deficit external states:
Eliminate from landscape
(Environmental “should nots”)
Greed
Anxiety, Paranoia Boredom; Ennui
Worry, Doubt, Mistrust, Inferiority Hopelessness; Depression
Loneliness, Sympathy, Regret Envy
Grief, Despair Embarrassment
Frustration, Resentment, Rage Shame; Contempt Hate
Annoyance, Arrogance (Superiority) Jealousy
Guilt; Remorse
MORAL UTILITY: Deficit internal states: Eliminate eliciting conditions
from the mindscape (Deficit, cognitive and behavioral “should nots”)

Eustress (+/Approach):
“Increase the stimulus” Contentment, Trust, Hope, Faith
Interest, Curiosity, Wonder Awe
Integrity
Joy Confidence, Pride, Courage Honor
(Success, optimums Camaraderie, Liking, Love Devotion
safety, growth ) Appreciation, Gratitude, Loyalty Compassion
Multipurpose Liberation, Flow, Inspiration Exuberance
need-meeting Amusement, Delight, Glee, Hilarity Mirth Divinity
successes and “right” Respect, Elevation, Admiration Unity
states of human being. Anticipation, Reminiscence Reverence
Tolerance, Acceptance, Forgiveness Mercy
Enthusiasm, Ambition Zeal
MORAL UTILITY: Generosity
Optimal external states: MORAL UTILITY: Grace
Maximize in the landscape Optimal internal states: Maximize elicitors in mindscape Rapture
(Environmental “shoulds”) (Optimal cognitive and behavioral “shoulds”)

Figure 3:
Interactive meaning dimensions within basic and complex feeling tones

45
 Emotional Sense 46

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