Thinking is just fancy feeling

I used this phrase at a recent talk to try and convey the jist of what I was saying, and to make people realise that what I am saying extends beyond learning - indeed touches every aspect of our lives: identity, ethics, culture, philosophy, psychology, computing, language, development, individual difference to name but a few.

As we experience the world we react to it. We store these reactions, and these distinct reactions - ideas - are the building blocks of cognition. Everything is processed affectively.

People have struggled with ‘Affective Context’ because it is a new phrase, one which – ironically - has little affective context itself since by definition it is a departure from the familiar. And for that same reason I have persisted with it: ‘evolution’ was an alien phrase when first introduced, but replacing it with the more colloquial ‘animals change’ would have damaged the original idea.

It is incredible to me that we ever believed that thinking was NOT just fancy feeling. When, for example, we see a dog bark at a squirrel we don’t imagine that the canine’s reason and emotion are somehow separate – that Fido’s feelings towards squirrels are somehow distinct from his thoughts about squirrels. At an intuitive level we get that the two are inseparable – but just for animals.

And there’s the rub – we aren’t animals, are we? Our brains function entirely differently. We have souls and they don’t.

This kind of superstitious thinking has both corrupted our thinking about ourselves and strengthened it: the mythology of humans as a supernatural creature, set apart from all others in form and function has permitted the kind of reckless disregard for the natural world that has allowed us to exploit it.

More recently, comparative neurology has struggled to find differences of type between human and other creatures (rats would seem to have pre-frontal cortexes for example) only differences of quantity (we have larger pre-frontal cortexes).

And yet despite this we have remained profoundly superstitious and pre-Darwinian in our thinking. We imagine ourselves to possess all manner of supernatural abilities – that our brain functions in an entirely different fashion. I’m not exaggerating: humans, so the story goes, have separate semantic and episodic memory. Do we imagine that dogs have separate semantic and episodic memory? Since Plato we have believed reason and emotion to be separate and yet somehow this magical separation is denied to rats. Despite reason and emotion being inseparable at a neurological level, we like to imagine they are separate in our heads.

People struggle with the idea that thinking is just fancy feeling – that thoughts such as a conversation or a book could just be an extrapolation of the barking sounds that a dog makes. But they are. People aren’t much moved by reason, they are profoundly illogical. They love things that they cannot explain – music, for example. They have fallen in love with the idea of ideas - with the Cartesian mind/body dualism that pervades Western thought and language.

It sometimes seems to people that our emotional system is not sufficiently sophisticated to support the complexity of human thought. And yet animals who – until very recently – behaved similarly to humans seem to do just fine. Have our brains radically changed in the last few thousand years? Did we only start thinking a few thousand years ago? When we were wandering in nomadic groups much like chimps, do we imagine we were thinking and our cousins were not?

But how can thinking be comprised entirely of ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’? Of course it is not. Open a dictionary. Each of those words describes a distinct sentiment. The word ‘chair’ describes the sentiment ‘feels like a chair’. Children do not learn words from dictionaries – they learn the word ‘chair’ from parents hissing ‘get down from there!’ and ‘Sit there!’. Each emotional encounter shapes the sense of a word.

We string these sentiments together and we have a book – a long procession of delicate, distinct sentiments, strung together as a story. If words were not this way there would be no scope for interpretation, metaphor or poetry.

So yes – thinking is just fancy feeling. What I have expressed here is a complex set of sentiments reflecting an emotional orientation towards the world. You will most likely experience an emotional reaction - common to encounters with strangeness – that may be expressed in a variety of ways: from counter-argument to outright dismissal. What I am saying is not incompatible with a scientific outlook; we can use a complex of feelings towards the world – a story – to make predictions, for example. Indeed, our emotions are always anticipating what comes next; what someone will do and say for example. Taken together, our affective states are a prediction machine.

What I can promise is this: at some point in the future the things I have written here will seem self-evident. So obvious as to be laughable. We will chuckle at the thought of people so primitive – so superstitious – as to imagine reason and emotion to be separate, just as we feel today towards people who imagined soul and body to be distinct.

image: Guillaume Bourdages