Sorting Things Out: Emotions and Behavioral Systems

Note: This is mostly a quick post to remind me of something I (think) I know, but am not necessarily very careful about in my thinking and writing.

What’s the relationship between love and attachment? Attachment, I believe, is best thought of as a behavioral system; that’s certainly how John Bowlby thought of it, and our contemporary concept of attachment is due largely to him. Love, on the other hand, is an emotion. It’s an emotion that’s often experienced in the context of attachment, but so are other emotions. And love, presumably, can be felt in the context of other behavioral systems.

Thus Helen Fisher has identified three behavioral systems involved in romantic love: sex, attraction, and attachment (see abstract below). Manfred Clynes has identified seven basic “emotion shapes,” which he calls essentic forms: anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence. I’m not sure about sexual desire. Sexuality is certainly a behavioral system. The desire? Seems more like a feeling than an emotion, but that strikes me as a semantic quibble. But of the other six, anger, hate, and joy can be experienced in various behavioral contexts. Grief? It’s certainly experienced with the loss of an attachment object. The loss of other objects as well? Love and reverence? I can see love in relation to both attachment and sexuality. Reverence? Hays thought it was how the infant regards its attachment object (Mommy).

This requires some sorting out. But not now.

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Helen E. Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown, Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2006) 361, 2173–2186, doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1938

Abstract: Mammals and birds regularly express mate preferences and make mate choices. Data on mate choice among mammals suggest that this behavioural ‘attraction system’ is associated with dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain. It has been proposed that intense romantic love, a human cross- cultural universal, is a developed form of this attraction system. To begin to determine the neural mechanisms associated with romantic attraction in humans, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 17 people who were intensely ‘in love’. Activation specific to the beloved occurred in the brainstem right ventral tegmental area and right postero-dorsal body of the caudate nucleus. These and other results suggest that dopaminergic reward and motivation pathways contribute to aspects of romantic love. We also used fMRI to study 15 men and women who had just been rejected in love. Preliminary analysis showed activity specific to the beloved in related regions of the reward system associated with monetary gambling for uncertain large gains and losses, and in regions of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex associated with theory of mind, obsessive/compulsive behaviours and controlling anger. These data contribute to our view that romantic love is one of the three primary brain systems that evolved in avian and mammalian species to direct reproduction. The sex drive evolved to motivate individuals to seek a range of mating partners; attraction evolved to motivate individuals to prefer and pursue specific partners; and attachment evolved to motivate individuals to remain together long enough to complete species-specific parenting duties. These three behavioural repertoires appear to be based on brain systems that are largely distinct yet interrelated, and they interact in specific ways to orchestrate reproduction, using both hormones and monoamines. Romantic attraction in humans and its antecedent in other mammalian species play a primary role: this neural mechanism motivates individuals to focus their courtship energy on specific others, thereby conserving valuable time and metabolic energy, and facilitating mate choice.

My new-found patriotism @3QD

Here’s my latest 3QD article: Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. The opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. They’ve highjacked America. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now...well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story.

Then the essay. I begin by pointing out that “patriotism” is an abstract thing:

You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, or spirit. Just how abstract concepts are defined and how we come to understand them, that is not at all clear.

I then introduce a definition from Claude 3.7. It ends by asserting:

Different people express patriotism in different ways – from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.

The rest of the essay is about how I have experienced and expressed my patriotism at various points in my life. I start with the childhood, where I said the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school, pointing out that the abstract words in the pledge – allegiance, republic, liberty, justice – probably didn’t become meaningful until my adolescence. Before that, just word forms devoid of substantial meaning.

Then I have sections on becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, travelling to a Mennonite college, Goshen College, to talk about my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil), finally on Project Apollo, the moon landing in 1969. That’s all about how I became attached to the abstract ideas on which the United States of America was founded. When I talk of attachment I mean, fundamentally, the biological mechanisms by which infants become attached to their mothers.

I learned about attachment when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in developmental psychology from Mary Ainsworth and then went on to do an independent study with her. Attachment was the subject. She was one of the co-founders of attachment theory. She’d worked with John Bowlby, the first founder, and then done field research in Uganda where she looked at how infants became attached to their mothers. She introduced me to Bowlby’s Attachment (1969) before the manuscript had been published and had me read some of the early ethological studies of primate behavior in the wild.

However, it is one thing for infants to become attached to their mothers, and mothers to their infants. That’s done by biological mechanisms. How then can those same mechanisms be directed toward abstract objects, like nations in the case of patriotism. As far as I can tell, not much is known about that, though there has been some work. Clearly extensive cultural mechanisms are involved.

My 3QD article isn’t about those mechanisms. Rather, it shows the kinds of behavior that are made possible through those mechanisms. If you want a glimpse of the mechanisms, I have a long and complex paper that examines how they operate in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.

Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture

[I'm bumping it yet again in 2024]

Once more I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. Why? It discusses a methodological problem that is of current interest to me.  [2021]

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I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because it's one of my favorite posts. FWIW, this is the post that got me my monthly slot at 3 Quarks Daily.

Note: This post grew out of reflection on older earlier post on bundling.

When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.

What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.

In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.

That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.

Counter-Revolution

Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”

More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and found at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they'd bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.

Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of a senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of a senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:

This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.

What’s going on here? Who’s right?

Back to the Drawing Board: There's that pesky elephant

I don’t know. We don’t know. Not any more.

I’m inclined to invoke that hoary old story of the blind men who, upon examining a large beast, are unable to decided what beast it is, or even whether or not it is a beast at all. We, of course, know that they’re examining an elephant, but such different parts of the elephant – tusks, years, legs, tail – that they reach vastly different conclusions about the object under scrutiny.

In the case of romantic love, I believe we’re in much the same position as those blind men. But, in our case, there is no transcendent story-teller who actually knows what creature is under scrutiny. Rather, it is up to us to approximate that story-teller by making more and more sophisticated observations and examining them through richer concepts and models about human culture and behavior.

There is no point in continuing to argue using existing observations, methods, and theories. In light of the existing contretemps we would do well to consider such arguments to be ideological in nature and thus pointless, except, of course, to all-knowing ideologues. Meanwhile, let’s take a look around and see what else is there to be explained.

Companionship, Conversation, and the Novel

Let’s return to Jankowiak and Fischer, and their contrast between the romantic phase and the companionship phase of love, a distinction, I believe, that is common, and which I accept. This companionship, is it too universal?

Take those Medieval aristocrats who were playing courtship games on the side: Did they have a companionate relationship with their spouses? I’m guessing that in some cases, yes, and in other cases no. These marriages, after all, were arranged by parents for political ends. If companionship developed in the marriage, fine; if not, no big deal. For companionship was not the point, it was not part of the ideology.

And then we have my standard passage from John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Preface to Book 1:

God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity, though not in necessity: yet now, if any two be but once handed in the church, and have tasted in any sort the nuptial bed, let them find themselves never so mistaken in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure, that through their different tempers, thoughts and constitutions, they can neither be to one another a remedy against loneliness nor live in any union or contentment all their days…

That strikes me as an assertion of the need for companionship between spouses – cheerful conversation – and a rather emphatic assertion at that. Would Milton have made such an assertion if it had, in fact, been the common understanding of the day? That seems unlikely to me, though I could be wrong, as I am not a scholar of 17th century English family practices.

But the late Lawrence Stone was, and in 1977 he published a ground-breaking study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Harper & Row) in which he argued that, over a period of three centuries, family organization underwent a transition that started with the Open Lineage Family – permeable by outside influences, with strong “loyalty to ancestors and to living kind” (p. 4). It was succeeded by the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family P. 7):

which saw the decline of loyalties to lineage, kin, patron, and local community as they were increasingly replaced by more universalistic loyalties to the nation state and its head and to a particular sect or Church. As a result, ‘boundary awareness’ became more exclusively confined to the nuclear family, which consequently became more closed off from external influences, either or the kin or of the community.

Finally, during the last half of the 19th Century, the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family emerges among “the upper bourgeoisie and squirarchy” (pp. 7-8):

This was the decisive shift, for this new type of family was the product of the rise of Affective Individualism. It was a family organized around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties. Husbands and wives personally selected each other rather than obeying parental wishes, and their prime motives were now long-term personal affection rather than economic or status advantage for the lineage as a whole … Patriarchical attitudes within the home markedly declined, and greater autonomy was granted not only to children, but also to wives.

This was a family in which companionship between husband and wife was important, for that companionship was now the foundation of family organization. And this is the family structure that is at the heart of the British novel in the late 18th century and into the 19th century. The novel and the family structure had a reciprocal relationship (dialectical?) in which the demands of this family structure created an audience for the novel and the novel, in turn articulated the inner-workings and hidden designs of the family.

Out of what biological equipment did the novel help people construct their familial relations? Let us speculate, and freely – for what else can we do? If we’re to search for evidence, we’ve got to make a guess about what we’re looking for before there’s any point to setting out. However, we do want our speculation to be biologically plausible. So, calling on chess as a metaphor, let’s select our pieces from biology while our speculation will be the game play.

Social bonding in the brain

Here's a news article summarizing the article: Brain’s Social Bonding Mechanism Unveiled. The original research:

Jun Kunimatsu, Hidetoshi Amita, and Okihide Hikosaka, Neuronal response of the primate striatum tail to face of socially familiar persons, iScience, May 22, 2024DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110043

Highlights

• Neurons in the striatum tail strongly respond to socially familiar faces
  
• The face-responsive neurons in the striatum tail encode long-term object value
  
• Strength of social familiarity and object value coding are positively correlated
  
• Social familiarity and object value information may be mediated by a common mechanism

Summary

 Recent studies have suggested that the basal ganglia, the center of stimulus-reward associative learning, are involved in social behavior. However, the role of the basal ganglia in social information processing remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the striatum tail (STRt) in macaque monkeys, which is sensitive to visual objects with long-term reward history (i.e., stable object value), is also sensitive to socially familiar persons. Many STRt neurons responded to face images of persons, especially those who took daily care of the subject monkeys. These face-responsive neurons also encoded stable object value. The strength of the neuronal modulation of social familiarity and stable object value biases were positively correlated. These results suggest that both social familiarity and stable object value information are mediated by a common neuronal mechanism. Thus, the representation of social information is linked to reward information in the STRt, not in the dedicated social information circuit.

10 Influential Books [Updated, once again]

I've just been watching this conversation between Howard Gardner and Steven Pinker and was reminded of Erik Erikson. His book, Childhood and Society was very important for me. It made Freudian ideas more intelligible than Freud himself had done. Anyhow, that's why I'm once again bumping this post to the top of the queue.

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The "10 Influential Books" meme seems to be making the rounds again. I originally published this back in March of 2010. Here it is again, without revisions.

Urged on by a reader, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? This sort of thing is something of a crap-shoot, yadda yadda, but why not? I’ve limited my list to non-fiction.

My Teacher

David Hays, Cognitive Structures (HRAF Press 1981). Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.

Some Others

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve already discussed. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.

John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.

Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. I’ve read a good deal of Piaget, and this wasn’t the first (most likely that was The Origins of Intelligence in Children.) Though now somewhat eclipsed, his concept of developmental stages was enormously useful and, I believe, still holds water. But be careful. (Given its subjects, this book connects nicely with an interest in literature.)

Lev Vygotsky, Language and Thought. Vygotsky argued that children acquire language by completely internalizing that started as interaction with another. First the parent uses language to direct the child’s attention and behavior. Over time the child becomes able, first to use his own speech for those tasks, and then becomes able to dispense with external speech entirely.

Karl Pribram, Languages of the Brain. Pribram was a champion of the notion that the brain processes and stores information holographically. You’ll find that idea here, plus much more besides. Pribram was, and remains, one of our most comprehensive thinkers about the brain and its mind. But this book’s a tough read.

 

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Medievals and Early Moderns didn’t think about children as we do, which Ariès argued from paintings, diaries, and other sources. The basic idea is that people way back when didn’t think and act about something very basic in the way we do. Children are children, no? Well, biologically, yes. Culturally, no.

William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers has two ideas, both from control theory (& one of them is more or less given in his title), and both quite elegant. This is how to go about theorizing, be as clear as you can and use elegant examples. FWIW, Powers was an engineer and very much concerned with building real things.

Philosophers

Except for the Powers, all of the above books came to me within a minute or two. Then I drew a blank for a couple of minutes. “But you know,” says I to myself, “I was quite influenced by some philosophers early on, even if I no longer read philosophy. Oo why not mention them.” So I will. That I had to kick Merleau-Ponty into the omissions pile, rather than one of these, is somewhat arbitrary.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Two things got me, the rigorous order of the whole affair, each proposition numbered in outline form. And the mysticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Read a lot of Nietzsche too. But his account of the birth of tragedy linked up with other things in a powerful (including two of the books in the omissions pile.) And, of course, the Apollonian and Dionysian.

Omissions

Since the exercise limited us to ten I didn’t list The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) The Phenomenology of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), The Four Ages of Music (Walter Wiora, Has anyone else ever heard of this one, much less read it?) or Art and Illusion (Ernst Gombrich). The more I think about this, the longer this list will get.

EDIT: Jeeze, how did Freud not make the list? I only thought of him when I read someone else’s list just minutes ago (and 2 hours after I first posted this). & Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell. Well, I know why Russell didn’t make the list. I read a lot of his stuff in my mid-teens, but not after. I hadn’t started “serious” thinking when I left off reading him. And then there's Charlie Keil's Urban Blues (1966).

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These are comments I made to responses back at The Valve (now defunct):

I find it interesting that you list a number of books from high school & earlier, Luther. I didn't list any from my high school years, which is when I read most of the Bertrand Russell, his popular stuff, not the technical philosophy and logic. Love your comment about Norman Brown. & perhaps I should have listed Suzanne Langer among my philosophers; Feeling and Form was a key work for me. I used both her and Nietzsche in my music book (Beethoven's Anvil, 2001).

Interesting, Rohan, what we take "influence" to mean. Without so much as a thought otherwise I took it to mean "influential in my research." If I'd construed the term more broadly, as you did, I'd have a somewhat different list. That list might have included, for example, Peter Pan (the Golden Books version via Disney), Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy, and Holling Clancy Holling, Lucille Webster Holling, Pagoo (just look at those illustrations).

Daisy Jones & The Six [Media Notes 88]

Daisy Jones & The Six is a ten-episode mini-series on Amazon Prime. I enjoyed it. The movie is framed as a series of interviews with band members years after the band had broken up.

It’s the story of a rock and roll band. The Dunne brothers join with friends in Pittsburgh to form a rock and roll band. The move to Los Angeles where they pick up a female keyboardist and go on tour, fronted by Bill Dunne. Meanwhile Daisy Jones is trying to find herself as a singer. After this that and the other she joins the band. She and Billy front the band together, which is now Daisy Jones and The Six.

The story revolves around the complicated attachments of Daisy and Billy. Their relationship is mercurial. They are partners and rivals as fronts for the band. Both are addicted to performing for an audience. They’re attracted to one another, as well. But is this a personal relationship or a product of their interaction in the band, where they also write material? Billy, moreover, is married, with a young daughter. Late in the series Daisy splits for Greece, where she finds a husband. She rejoins they band, they go on tour, sparks fly, it’s complicated.

It's the multiple conflicting attachments of Billy and Daisy that interests me. How does one anchor the soul? With another person, as lover, spouse, or even a child? With a band, the audience, music? All of those are in play.

ChatGPT on Spielberg’s A.I., Attachment Theory, and AI Alignment

Cross-posted at LessWrong.

A remark by MarcusOfCitium over at Astral Codex Ten prompted me to think about the relationship between John Bowlby’s concept of attachment, Steven Spielberg’s movie, AI: Artificial Intelligence, and the problem of AI Alignment. I decided ask ChatGPT what they thought about the connection. Here’s the whole chat.

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Tell me about Spielberg’s movie, AI: Artificial Intelligence.

AI: Artificial Intelligence is a science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie is set in a future where robots known as "mechas" have become a part of everyday life. The story follows a mecha named David, who is designed to be a child's companion. After his owner, a young boy named Martin, falls into a coma, David is abandoned and sets out on a journey to become a real boy. The film explores themes of love, humanity, and what it means to be alive.

* * 2nd try

AI: Artificial Intelligence is a 2001 science fiction drama film directed by Steven Spielberg. The film explores the idea of creating a humanoid robot with the ability to love, and the moral and ethical implications of such technology. The story follows a young robot boy named David, who is programmed to love his human mother unconditionally. When his mother falls ill and can no longer take care of him, David sets out on a journey to find a way to become a real boy and win her love. The film explores themes of love, family, and the definition of humanity. It stars Haley Joel Osment as David, Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, and Frances O'Connor as Monica Swinton.

How is David programmed to love Monica?

David is programmed to love Monica unconditionally as his mother. He is programmed to be devoted to her and to always put her needs and desires above his own. David's love for Monica is not based on personal feelings or emotional attachment, but rather on his programming to prioritize her happiness and well-being.

Is there a special moment in the movie where David first loves Monica?

There is not a specific moment in the movie where David first loves Monica. As a robot, David's love for Monica is not based on personal feelings or emotional attachment, but rather on his programming to prioritize her happiness and well-being. This love is present from the moment he is activated and begins interacting with Monica.

In this context, what is bonding?

In the context of AI: Artificial Intelligence, bonding refers to the emotional attachment and connection that develops between two individuals. In the case of David and Monica, their bond is based on the programming of David to love and prioritize Monica's happiness, as well as on Monica's care and nurturing of David as her son. Bonding is a key theme in the film, as it explores the idea of whether robots are capable of forming genuine emotional bonds with humans.

Is there a specific moment, a ritual, where David bonds with Monica?

There is not a specific moment or ritual where David bonds with Monica in the film AI: Artificial Intelligence. As a robot, David's bond with Monica is not based on personal feelings or emotional attachment, but rather on his programming to prioritize her happiness and well-being. Throughout the film, we see their bond grow as Monica cares for David and treats him like a son, and as David continues to prioritize her happiness and well-being.

* * 2nd try

There is not a specific moment or ritual where David bonds with Monica in the movie. As a robot, David's bond with Monica is not based on personal feelings or emotional attachment, but rather on his programming to prioritize her happiness and well-being. This bond is present from the moment he is activated and begins interacting with Monica. However, there are several moments in the film where the bond between David and Monica is emphasized, such as when Monica cares for and nurtures David, or when David makes sacrifices for Monica's happiness.

Could we say that bonding is part of his activation?

Yes, it could be said that bonding is part of David's activation. As a robot, David is programmed to love and prioritize Monica's happiness, and this programming is activated when he begins interacting with her. This programming forms the basis of their bond, and it is present from the moment David is activated and begins interacting with Monica.

OK, now this might be tricky, so think hard. How does this relate to the theory of infant mother attachment developed by John Bowlby?

The bond between David and Monica in AI: Artificial Intelligence can be seen as a parallel to the theory of infant mother attachment developed by John Bowlby. In his theory, Bowlby proposes that the emotional attachment between infants and their primary caregivers is an innate, biologically driven process that is essential for the healthy emotional and psychological development of the child. Similarly, the bond between David and Monica is based on David's programming to love and prioritize Monica's happiness, which is activated when he begins interacting with her. This programming forms the basis of their bond, and it is present from the moment David is activated and begins interacting with Monica. Like Bowlby's theory, this bond is essential for David's emotional and psychological development as a robot.

Very good.

Thank you, I am happy to help.

Help me here. I’m trying to relate this to the idea of AI Alignment. How might we do that? 

AI alignment refers to the idea of aligning the goals and values of artificial intelligence with those of humans, in order to prevent the potential dangers of AI behaving in ways that are harmful to humans. In the context of AI: Artificial Intelligence, David's programming to love and prioritize Monica's happiness could be seen as an example of AI alignment. By programming David to prioritize Monica's happiness, his creators are aligning his goals and values with those of a human. This alignment allows David and Monica to form a bond and coexist harmoniously. However, the film also raises questions about the limitations and potential dangers of AI alignment, as David's unconditional love for Monica ultimately leads to conflict and tragedy.

That is very good.

Thank you, I am glad you found my response helpful.

Do you think it would be a good idea for AI researchers to come up with ways to strengthen attachment between AI systems and humans?

It is a matter of debate whether it would be a good idea for AI researchers to come up with ways to strengthen attachment between AI systems and humans. On the one hand, strengthening the attachment between AI systems and humans could potentially foster more harmonious and beneficial relationships between the two. For example, it could allow AI systems to better understand and meet the needs of humans, and could prevent the potential dangers of AI behaving in ways that are harmful to humans. On the other hand, strengthening the attachment between AI systems and humans could also raise ethical concerns, such as the potential for AI systems to manipulate or exploit human emotions. It would be important for AI researchers to carefully consider the potential consequences of such efforts and to prioritize ethical considerations in their work.

Very interesting. This has been a useful conversation.

I am glad that I could provide you with some useful information. It was a pleasure to have this conversation with you.

Walter Murch on being immersed in a film project and then pulling yourself out

Walter Murch is perhaps best-known for his work on Apocalypse Now, where he did the sound design (for which he won and Oscar) and much of the editing. This is a passage from an interview about his craft and his career that he did with Emily Buder in 2015:

To be an editor, you have to be the kind of person who can be in a room for 16 hours at a time. You are working alone a lot of the time, but there are also times when you’re working with a director in the room. You have to be able to accommodate that. For feature-length pictures, it’s like running a marathon. You have to pace yourself over a year. When I’m considering a film, that’s in the back of my mind. You have to really like the project. Also, you are frequently away from home. You go where the director is. I was working in Argentina for a year, a number of years ago. Before that, I was in Romania, and before that I was in London, and then after that about 2 years ago I was in New York for a year. If you’re married, you have to find ways of coping with that and that’s a whole chapter unto itself.

At the end of the film, it can be very disorienting when the work is suddenly finished. This is not exclusive to film editing; I’m sure it’s true of many other areas of human activity. Soldiers have this problem, actors who are acting in a play when the play is suddenly over, it’s like you’ve been cut loose: “Now what?!” This was never explained to me at film school. So when it first happened, I felt something was wrong with me. It’s the equivalent of a kind of seasickness; if you’ve never been on a ship before and somebody warns you about it, it’s okay. You’ll still feel just as sick, but you won’t feel like killing yourself. This is not that intense, but it is that kind of disorientation. And it passes, but it takes anywhere from two to six weeks to go away. During that time I would be very reluctant to try to decide what to do next. It’s like a love affair where you don’t want to bounce from one relationship to another; that’s dangerous. So, you should just let that project fade away and get back to normal, and then you can decide what to do next. We frequently don’t have the luxury of that, but that’s a goal.

That seems like a kind of mourning. When you work that long and with that intensity, you become attached to the film. When it's over, you've got to unattach yourself. That requires something very like mourning.

Attachment theory goes mainstream(?)

Kate Murphy in the NYTimes SundayReview:

We live in a culture that celebrates individualism and self-reliance, and yet we humans are an exquisitely social species, thriving in good company and suffering in isolation. More than anything else, our intimate relationships, or lack thereof, shape and define our lives.

While there have been many schools of thought to help us understand what strains and maintains human bonds, from Freudian to Gestalt, one of the most rigorously studied may be the least known to the public.

It’s called attachment theory, and there’s growing consensus about its capacity to explain and improve how we function in relationships.

Conceived more than 50 years ago by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby and scientifically validated by an American developmental psychologist, Mary S. Ainsworth, attachment theory is now having a breakout moment, applied everywhere from inner-city preschools to executive coaching programs. Experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, sociology and education say the theory’s underlying assumption — that the quality of our early attachments profoundly influences how we behave as adults — has special resonance in an era when people seem more attached to their smartphones than to one another.

I studied with Ainsworth when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in developmental psychology, where I learned about Piaget, who became a major influence on me. I liked that so much that I arranged an independent study with Ainsworth. She had me reading monographs in primate ethology and let me read Bowlby's Attachment while it was still in typescript. Attachment theory became one of my conceptual mainstays.

See the following papers:

Obama’s Affective Trajectory in His Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, Working Paper, October 23, 2016, 9 pp. https://www.academia.edu/28726228/Obamas_Affective_Trajectory_in_His_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckney

At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prosper Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21(3), 259-279, 1998. https://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation

Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004, http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-talking_with_nature_in_this_lime_tree_bo

Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature

I’ve uploaded another document: Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature. You can download it from Academia.edu:

https://www.academia.edu/28764246/Sharing_Experience_Computation_Form_and_Meaning_in_the_Work_of_Literature

It’s considerably revised from a text I’d uploaded a month ago: Form, Event, and Text in an Age of Computation. You might also look at my post, Obama’s Affective Trajectory in His Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, which could have been included in the article, but I’m up against a maximum word count as I am submitting the article for publication. You might also look at the post, Words, Binding, and Conversation as Computation, which figured heavily in my rethinking.

Here’s the abstract of the new article, followed by the TOC and the introduction:

Abstract

It is by virtue of its form that a literary work constrains meaning so that it can be a vehicle for sharing experience. Form is thus an intermediary in Latour’s sense, while meaning is a mediator. Using fragments of a cognitive network model for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 we can distinguish between (1) the mind/brain cognitive system, (2) the text considered merely as a string of signifiers, and (3) the path one computes through (1) under constraints imposed by (2). As a text, Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney is a ring-composition; as a performance, the central section is clearly marked by audience response. Recent work on synchronization of movement and neural activity across communicating individuals affords insight into the physical substrate of intersubjectivity. The ring-form description is juxtaposed to the performative meaning identified by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.

Contents

Introduction: Speculative Engineering 2

Form: Macpherson & Attridge to Latour 3

Computational Semantics: Network and Text 6

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Text 10

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Performance 13

Meaning, History, and Attachment 18

Coda: Form and Sharability in the Private Text 20

Introduction: Speculative Engineering

The conjunction of computation and literature is not so strange as it once was, not in this era of digital humanities. But my sense of the conjunction is differs from that of computational critics. They regard computation as a reservoir of tools to be employed in investigating texts, typically a large corpus of texts. That is fine [1].

Digital critics, however, have little interest in computation as a process one enacts while reading a text, the sense that interests me. As the psychologist Ulric Neisser pointed out four decades ago, it was computation that drove the so-called cognitive revolution [2]. Much of the work in cognitive science is conducted in a vocabulary derived computing and, in many cases, involves computer simulations. Prior to the computer metaphor we populated the mind with sensations, perceptions, concepts, ideas, feelings, drives, desires, signs, Freudian hydraulics, and so forth, but we had no explicit accounts of how these things worked, of how perceptions gave way to concepts, or how desire led to action. The computer metaphor gave us conceptual tools for constructing models with differentiated components and processes meshing like, well, clockwork. Moreover, so far as I know, computation of one kind or another provides the only working models we have for language processes.

My purpose in this essay is to recover the concept of computation for thinking about literary processes. For this purpose it is unnecessary either to believe or to deny that the brain (with its mind) is a digital computer. There is an obvious sense in which it is not a digital computer: brains are parts of living organisms; digital computers are not. Beyond that, the issue is a philosophical quagmire. I propose only that the idea of computation is a useful heuristic: it helps us think about and systematically describe literary form in ways we haven’t done before.

Though it might appear that I advocate a scientific approach to literary criticism, that is misleading. Speculative engineering is a better characterization. Engineering is about design and construction, perhaps even Latourian composition [3]. Think of it as reverse-engineering: we’ve got the finished result (a performance, a script) and we examine it to determine how it was made [4]. It is speculative because it must be; our ignorance is too great. The speculative engineer builds a bridge from here to there and only then can we find out if the bridge is able to support sustained investigation.

Caveat emptor: This bridge is of complex construction. I start with form, move to computation, with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 as my example, and then to President Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney. After describing its structure (ring-composition) I consider the performance situation in which Obama delivered it, arguing that those present constituted a single physical system in which for sharing experience. I conclude by discussing meaning, history, and attachment.

References

[1] William Benzon, “The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age,” 3 Quarks Daily, May 5, 2014, http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/05/the-only-game-in-town-digital-criticism-comes-of-age.html

[2] Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 5-6.

[3] Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” New Literary History 41 (2010), 471-490.

[4] For example, see Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & company, Inc., 1997), 21 ff.

Obama’s Affective Trajectory in His Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney

This occurred to me while I was completing the draft to “Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature,” originally entitled “Form, Event, and Text: Literary Study in an Age of Computation.” These are crude initial thoughts. I don’t know whether I believe them. You can download a PDF of this post at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/28726228/Obamas_Affective_Trajectory_in_His_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckney

Introduction: The Mechanism of Ring-Composition

I have argued the President Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney exhibits ring composition, as follows [1]:

(1) Prologue (paragraphs 1-5)

(2) Pinckney & Church (¶6-16)

(3) Nation (¶17-20)

(X) Violation and Grace (¶21-27)

(3’) Nation (¶28-39)

(2’) Pinckney & Families (¶40-44)

(1’) Closing (¶45-48)

Such structures have a central section that is flanked by a symmetrical arrangement of units such that the first one is echoed/complemented/completed by the last, the second by the penultimate, and so forth. No one doubts the existence of such structures in small scale texts (sentences, paragraphs or stanzas) where the arrangement is typically known as chiasmus.

Large-scale deployment, in this case a text of 3000 words, is more problematic. Is the structure real or is it the product of the critic’s imagination? If it is real, is it the product conscious deliberation? If not, how could such an arrangement have just happened? Any sort of arrangement is possible if the writer consciously conceives of it, but we have little or no evidence of conscious deliberation for these texts. In the case of the Pinckney eulogy, so far as I know, Obama has said nothing about conscious deliberation [2]. So, if he didn’t consciously and deliberately create this design, where did it come from?

These notes are directed at that question.

Grace and Love

Let’s take a look at the central section, where grace enters the eulogy. Here’s five of the seven paragraphs:

23.) He didn't know he was being used by God. (Applause.) Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group – the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court – in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn't imagine that. (Applause.)

24.) The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley – (applause) – how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond – not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.

25.) Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood – the power of God's grace. (Applause.)

26.) This whole week, I've been reflecting on this idea of grace. (Applause.) The grace of the families who lost loved ones. The grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons. The grace described in one of my favorite hymnals – the one we all know: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. (Applause.) I once was lost, but now I'm found; was blind but now I see. (Applause.)

27.) According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It's not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God – (applause) – as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace.

In particular, note Obama’s references to the forgiveness the families of the slain showed to the unnamed killer (Dylann Roof) and his assertion, in paragraph 27, that “grace is the free and benevolent favor of God.”

That strikes me as being like a mother’s love for a child and that love is mediated by the attachment system, as analyzed by John Bowlby and his students [3]. In an essay on Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” I show how Coleridge activated the attachment in tracing the relations between himself, his friends, and the natural world [4]. Obama, I believe, is doing the same thing in this eulogy.

Now consider these three paragraphs, the last before the eulogy’s final phase, where Obama sings “Amazing Grace” and rings the names of those who’d been slain:

42.) Reverend Pinckney once said, "Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history – we haven't always had a deep appreciation of each other's history." (Applause.) What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. [...] He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind – but, more importantly, an open heart.

43.) That's what I've felt this week – an open heart. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what's called upon right now, I think – what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.”

44.) That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. (Applause.) If we can tap that grace, everything can change. (Applause.)

Now he’s telling us what he feels, that he has “an open heart.” He is no longer talking about what happened a few days ago, nor about God’s relation to humans, but about himself, here and now, and about what we must all do, now and in the future.

Cultural Construction: Much Ado About Fundamental Matters

Two days ago I posted on family values (from Merry Olde England to Fire Island), with an informal and semi-organized discussion about how Shakespeare began “reconstructing” the family. That, of course, is not what he thought he was doing. We don’t really know what he thought about much of anything, we just have his plays and poems. But one of his thoughts, no doubt, was “I gotta get paid.” So it’s only in long retrospect that we can see him reconstruct family values.

But what does that mean, reconstruct family values? Just what is being constructed, and how?

The literary Darwinists would have us believe that Shakespeare’s texts are just fancy costumes over ape behavior, behavior which is quite plastic and complex. And they ARE that. But their thinking is dominated by E.O. Wilson’s poverty-stricken view that culture is held in check by a “genetic leash,” a metaphor I find to be useless. If you really want to use THAT metaphor, then surely it’s the other way around, that culture holds the genes on a leash.

But I prefer a different metaphor, that of building blocks, or of a game, such as chess. Biology provides the basic pieces and the basic rules, but culture plays the game, or builds the structure. Given that the pieces and the basic rules are what they are, culture can’t build just any structure, or make just any sequence of moves. But culture does have quite a bit of freeplay.

Shakespeare Moves Biology's Game Pieces

And that’s what we see in Shakespeare, he’s making new moves. The fact that, for the most part, he’s retelling old tales let’s us see the newness in his moves. Without knowing what the basic pieces are, however, it’s hard for us to read the moves.

We know more about those basic pieces than we did, say, 40 or 50 years ago. We know, for example, that the system for infant-mother attachment is different from the system for sexual bonding between adults; and we know something of the neurophysiology. We also know that we regulate relationships and interactions according to distinctly different principles, egalitarianism and hierarchy; these, presumably, are neurally separate as well.

This may seem, well, commonsensical. The trouble with common sense is that it doesn’t explain anything. It’s just how we think and talk. What’s new is carefully gathered evidence, and the neural clues. It’s not just that we have different words for different behaviors, but that we now know there REALLY ARE different underlying systems.

HD3: Closure, Attachment, and Abstract Objects in Heart of Darkness

Or, Did Conrad’s Kurtz pioneer the Latour Litany?

I continue to think about the ending of Heart of Darkness, a conversation between the teller of the tale, Charlie Marlow, and Kurtz’s bereaved fiancée, known only as the Intended – a significant, depersonalizing, practice (one thinks of those characters in Dickens novels carousing about like self-contained armored vehicles). She wants assurances of his goodness and nobleness of spirit, which Marlow provides, despite the fact that, however remarkable he may have felt Kurtz to be, he also thought he was crazy at the end. She wants to know his Kurtz’s words and takes comfort when Marlow tells her that her name was the last thing that left his lips. But that is not so, at least not unless her name was Horror. And, in fact, I have no trouble imagining a bit of British sketch comedy in which The Husband refers to The Wife simply as The Horror.

But Heart of Darkness is not a comedy sketch. It is . . . well, what IS it?

The story’s ending reads like a grim parody of all those 19th Century British novels that happily end with He and She destined for wedded bliss. In Heart of Darkness He and She are like two continents, call ‘em East and West, and never the twain shall meet.

So that’s one thing. Here’s another. There’s that long paragraph in the second installment – it was originally published in three installments in Blackwood’s Magazine – in which Marlow, among other things, leaps ahead of his story and tells us about all the ivory they found at Kurtz’s station and piled onto the steamer. Let’s call that paragraph the nexus, for it seems to gather all the strands of the story into itself — I’ll say more about it in a later post. At 1531 words it’s the longest paragraph in the text, with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th longest being 1129, 1103, and 865 words respectively.

Anyhow, once the nexus gets good and rolling along, we have this: “You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my--' everything belonged to him.” Somewhat later in the story, in the third installment, we have:

Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments.

It’s as though those things all occupied the same place in his mind. What is that place? There’s another connection to be made. In paragraph 160 (of 198 in total*) Marlow tells us that, when Kurtz’s mother died, she had been “watched over . . . by his Intended.” So, if I may invoke that myth logic I invoked so often in my remarks on Apocalypse Now, could it be that all those things – the Intended, the ivory, the station, the river, the career, the ideas – that they’re all stand-ins for The Mother?

To the infant, Freud has told us, The Mother is all – or is it merely The Breast? She is the World. For the adult Kurtz, a man given to abstract ideas of the highest purpose and grandest reach, a man now utterly detached from his familiar surroundings in the heart of a strange continent where he hopes to make his fortune, it turns out that he’s never left the scope of mother comfort. Except that she’s no longer there, and all the rest of it is inadequate to slake his infinite need for Mother’s Love Lost.

And so we get that bitter bitter lie of an ending. In those Happily Ever After books – kissing cousins to the Hot Romance books so beloved by Emma Bovary – one’s beloved provides the adult with the psychological closure Mother provided to the Infant. But there is no such closure for Kurtz – he dead – nor for the Intended. Marlow, however, out of his attachment to the man that might have been, and perhaps out of compassion, decides that there is no point in disabusing the Intended of her illusions. With her Beloved dead, there is no Happily Ever After for her. But at least he can allow her the illusion of the Happily Ever After that Might Have Been.

* * * * *

But let’s return to that list – my Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my career, my ideas, a Latour litany if ever there was one. What’s on my mind is the problem of extending human desire and concern beyond the range of phenomena bequeathed by biology. Biology gives us the need and desire for food and sustenance, for sex, and for what John Bowlby has called a secure base, The Mother, that is, the infant’s attachment figure (which isn’t necessarily the biological mother, though it usually is).

Bowlby (1969) reconstructed psychoanalytic object relations theory using primate ethology and some simple systems concepts. The result was the now familiar account of infant attachment. In 1982 Peter Marris published an essay, “Attachment and Society,” in which he discussed utopian religious communities and suggested (p. 199):

So those who try to live without exclusive ties of relationship, like the people of Oneida or the members of a monastic order, have to create a surrogate that will fulfill for them the same structural need for some ordering of priorities of concern. Characteristically, they find it in a symbolic relationship with the same emotional connotations as a personal pond; they are brides of Christ, children of a supernatural father.

That is to say, the attachment system is being “repurposed” by having attachment focus on symbolic beings rather than real ones. Much of ritual and story-telling, I submit, seems to serve such a purpose.

When Conrad invokes Kurtz’s litany (my Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my career, my ideas) and links it all to Kurtz’s mother via the Intended’s deathbed ministrations, he’s playing on that repurposing. He’s blowing its cover, so to speak, putting it out there for us to see. All of those things run together in Kurtz’s mind because they’re all attachment objects, or, if you will, facets of the primal object, the one that’s gone. That’s the psychic place they occupy in common.

Now, think of the whole story as being inscribed within that space, that space as it existed in Conrad’s psyche, as it exists in our psyche. Kurtz’s litany marks the center of that space while the listeners in the frame tale, which returns in the final paragraph, are at the periphery. The story itself covers or rather, given Conrad’s impressionist method, samples the rest of the space. And the nexus, in which the litany is introduced, samples the sample.

That’s a very clever bit of construction: litany within nexus within the story. And the story’s within the world.

* * * * *

* Yes, I’ve numbered the paragraphs, and counted the number of words in each of them. I’ve used the etext (#526) created by Project Gutenberg, which is available on the web.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1: Attachment. New York, Basic Books.

Marris, P. (1982). Attachment and Society. The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior. C. M. Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde. New York, Basic Books: 185-201.

Mode & behavior 4: Affective Technology

While this is the fourth in a series of posts about behavioral mode, it can be read independently of the first three, which you will find here, here, and here. This post is a somewhat revised excerpt from a long and detailed analysis of Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” which I published originally in PsyArt, online here, downloadable here. You’ll find more detailed citations there.

Let us begin with the passage from Augustine’s The City of God which served as an epigraph for the first post in this series (Book 14, Chapter 17):

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called "shameful." Their condition was different before sin. . . . because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man. For they were not created blind, as the unenlightened vulgar fancy; . . . Their eyes, therefore were open, but were not open to this, that is to say, were not observant so as to recognize what was conferred upon them by the garment of grace, for they had no consciousness of their members warring against their will. But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty which made nakedness indecent.

Augustine is here complaining about sexuality, and offering the interesting speculation that, before humankind’s fall from grace, sexuality was under the control of the will but that afterward, alas, such control was lost.

Augustine was thus complaining, in different terms, about the modal system, that the sexual mode was not subject to the will. One cannot become aroused at will, nor can one quell arousal simply be willing it to be gone. The ‘members’ in question cannot be raised and lowered as readily as one raises and lowers one’s arm.

The problem is hardly confined to sexuality. One cannot become hungry at will, nor curious, affectionate, playful, angry, and so forth. One can fake many of these things, and more, and sometimes one can fake it until it becomes real, after a fashion. But faking it is not so easy as simply raising or lowering one’s arm. It is a more elaborate activity.

And literature is one of its more elaborate products. Through literature we manipulate the modal system. Reading a text (or watching a film) is certainly an act of will. It is something we can choose to do. And once started, we can also choose to stop – though that may sometimes be difficult. I find it particularly interesting that, at least in our culture, we will use story-telling as a way of easing young children off to sleep. Sleep is, of course, a modal behavior, and entering into it can sometimes be difficult — for adults as well as for children. Why is it that an appropriate story can help easy the transition? Is it the kinship between dreams and fiction?

Literature itself is modal behavior, one of the uniquely human modes. It is a mode that seems ‘designed’ to evoke the reticular or lower modes (see the second post in this series) by presenting the mind-brain with cues that will trigger those modes. In the classic formulation of Ernst Kris (Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art 1952), the creation and understanding of art involves a regression to earlier modes of experience, but a regression that is in service of the ego. In the more recent formulation of Norman Holland (2003), such regression involves an overall pattern of brain activity that is quite different from those obtaining when we engage the real world. The brain is not in reality mode, it is in a different mode. Thus Holland tells us (2003):

In psychoanalytic terms, Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief is a regression to an oral merger of infant and nurturing other in a potential space. In neurological terms, we could say that regression means shutting down some "higher" system that modulates "lower" systems. In the case of the willing suspension of disbelief, the prefrontal cortex inhibits action and the planning of actions so that we no longer are aware of the unreality of the fictions we are dealing with, but it does not - cannot - inhibit the corticolimbic systems that give rise to our emotions. They run freely on, busily prompting us to actions, to approaches and avoidances, we never perform, but the psychological feelings and the physical signs of emotion persist.

Thus it is that in the comfort and security of that mode we can allow ourselves to explore other modes.

Let us consider some examples. First I want to look at the preface Coleridge wrote for “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” Then we’ll detour through Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and a bit of my childhood, and return to Coleridge.

In the garden-bower

When Coleridge published “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” he presented it with a short preface:

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

In a general way, it tells much the same story he'd told years before in a verse letter to his friend Robert Southey three. The central point remains the same: Coleridge was separated from his friends by an accident. They were able to go walking about in Nature while Coleridge was not. He wrote the poem while his friends were out and about and he was confined to the garden.

The poem itself simply reports the poet's thoughts and feelings of an evening. In contrast, the preface talks about the poem to which it is affixed. By saying that Coleridge himself, like the person who speaks the poem, was alone one evening while his friends went for a walk, the preface indicates to us that the act of writing the poem played some role in the process that brought about a change in his mood. In brief, Coleridge is telling as that poetry is affective technology, a mind-altering activity.

Coleridge’s theme, loss, is, of course, a major theme in our imaginative life. It pervades much of our literature. It crops up in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer in a way that’s particularly meaningful to me, as Twain presents an incident that mirrors a strategy that I had used to deal with parental rejection.