Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Paul Grobstein's picture

Bipartite brain: inconsistency, emotion, feeling?

My guess is that one can indeed learn to lessen the story teller's concern for "simplicity, logical consistency, and certainty," that that's what underlies zen buddhism among other meditative traditions. But yes too, I think there is an "unconscious part of the unconscious" that involves some level of commitment to at least simplicity and consistency, and that that is indeed a desireable complement to the unconscious lack of concern for such things. Having both, somewhat out of agreement but not in antagonistic conflict is indeed, I suspect, a sine qua non for "mental health".

The "emotion"/"feeling" thing in relation to the unconscious/conscious is a little tough to get one's head around. Damasio calls what the unconscious does "emotion" and reserves "feeling" for what one is aware of, the conscious states that may (or may not) accompany emotion. I'd call "feeling" in this sense "primary" story, as distinct from the secondary stories, interpretations, we place on feelings.

As per our conversation this afternoon, this gets interesting when one starts to think about people who don't "feel" things. Damasio would say they may still have emotions, and I would agree. The question is how to account for the absence of feeling. One possibility is that the relevant signals aren't sent from the unconscious to the story teller. A second is that the story teller fails to incorporate those signals into conscious experience. A third is that the story teller interprets the signals in ways that produce in consciousness something other than feeling. My guess is that one could find examples of all three possibilities (and probably some others as well).

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
5 + 8 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.