Emotion Paper

27 Oct 2022 - 01 Aug 2023

Emotion and the Dynamics of Representation Use, a position paper I wrote for a workshop on emotions in AI in 1992. It's pretty half-assed, but the ideas are still interesting, at least to me.

I'd absorbed critiques of representationalism from Agre and Chapman, but didn't accept their eliminitivism. So I wanted to come up with a way of thinking about representation that made sense.

Also had been working with Tinbergen-esque theories of animal behavior, and was kind of in the mode of looking for simple cognitive mechanisms that were more complex than mere reflexes but made evolutionary sense.

And was working under Marvin Minsky, trying to boil down aspects of his Society of Mind theory (which itself was rooted in Tinbergen and Freud) into something simple enough for me to understand and implement.

I coined the term "enactive representation", perhaps influenced by The Embodied Mind. I thought I was making it up pretty much from scratch.

Situated action theory [Agre and Chapman 1987] includes the idea of deictic representation, which combines this sort of “leaning-on- the-world” with the language of representation. It can be argued whether such constructs are really representational since they don’t involve mental state; they are more a way of talking about the relationship between the world and an actor’s dynamics. > The enactive view builds on the deictic view and attempts to integrate representations of things that aren’t actually available to the senses. The primary use of representation is imaginative, in that it is used to perceive what isn’t actually at hand. An enactive representer imaginatively re-enacts a past action in order to predict the result. Action becomes not only a matter of adaptive reaction to the world (as it is in situated action systems) but of reacting to imaginings about the world's future.

Since then "enactive cognition" has become a minor academic industry; as is often the case, I was ahead of the curve but didn't bother to ride the wave.

Suggests that the mechanisms I propose might underlie Freudian repression. This is a little embarrassing to read now, because Freud himself had very elaborately described models of how repression worked and what the dynamics of the machinery might be, which I guess I was ignorant of.

Furthur