between emotion and consciousness?
4. Motivated action is a necessary component, but what about representation?
Many contemporary “enactivists” try to construe our intentional activities solely in terms of overt action. While this approach has the advantage that it avoids thinking of subcortical emotional contributions merely as “triggers” for cortical activity, it also should avoid a demand for overt action to carry more weight than it really can. One way in which this problem occurs is by trying to minimize the role of representation.
Many enactivists see a stress on action as a way of sidestepping the difficult issue of representation. For example, Hutto (2006) wants to avoid information-theoretic or computationalist accounts by denying that representations (which traditionally entail conceptual interpretation) are part of the enactivist taxonomy:
The crux is that our primary modes of worldly and social responding do not involve the manipulation of representations or any inferential thought. ... On the contrary, we are intentionally directed at the intentional and affective attitudes of others (that is what we are meant to target) by means of natural signs – the
expressions of others. (Hutto 2006: 165–166)
The danger with this sort of attempt to avoid the errors of computationalist models is that it threatens to undermine the very enactivist approach Hutto supports. As we have argued, in any self-initiated action, the goal of the action must be represented as an essential component of the action program itself. Richard Menary, in his introduction to the volume on Hutto’s work just quoted, makes it clear that when Hutto and some other enactivists reject representation, they are thinking of representations purely as interpretations of afferent data. Hutto and Menary are right to be wary of these. But representations of internal goals as such are necessary to the guidance and comple-tion of any self-initiated accomple-tion. The motor programs essential to the planning and execution of any voluntary action include representations of the end-state, to which sensorimotor feedback from the completed action can be compared. These representa-tions are sent as corollary discharge to the cerebellum and elsewhere when the action is initiated, and are held online for the duration of the activity itself.
The term “representation” has been the source of confusion in much recent lit-erature. Enactivists rightly want to reject computationalist approaches that treat men-tal representations as meaningless symbols that map onto the external world and are manipulated by mental calculators. But if they do so by denying a role for representa-tions in any sense of the term, enactivism will fail. As we have argued, action imagery
that represents a planned action is central to voluntary motor activity (Jeannerod 1997).
We have to imagine doing an action in the process of deciding whether or not to do it, and this involves imagery of what it will feel like to do the action: its intermediate stages and its conclusion. Entertaining such representations is not calculating over meaning-less symbols; it is incorporating into cognition our interactions with the world. (For more detailed discussion of enactive accounts of representation, see Newton 2003).
It is widely agreed that the human cortex evolved in part to meet the need for complex and long-term action planning. Such planning, whether it involves prepar-ing a meal or settprepar-ing a distant educational goal, requires the weighprepar-ing, over time, of a full range of alternatives, from minute-to-minute details of the process to anticipatory specification of the desired end state. This planning must be done in the head; one can-not try out these possibilities in the real world.
Planning and evaluating actions requires motor imagery, and we have argued that this motor imagery is not merely a non-intentional physiological event, but, even when it occurs only pre-consciously, it can still be an intentional one. In our view, entertaining motor imagery is the activity of representing bodily actions and interac-tions with the external world.
The mental process of representing is not simply a matter of encoding signals from the external world, although these may be incorporated into the representing process. Primarily, representations are mental models of the subject’s embodied activi-ties, including the activity of sensorimotor experience. There is no question here of
“accuracy” or “misrepresentation” of this imagery. The imagery is an essential part of a process and does its job as part of that process. If mistakes are made, these involve mismatches between a subject’s goals and the outcome of the attempt to attain the goal, not between a representation and a separate and distinct object it is intended to represent. Thus the view of representations as intrinsically meaningless symbols, manipulated syntactically in order to encode information about the external world, is completely inappropriate in the context of enactivism.
5. Conclusion
We have argued not only that the neurophysiological substrates of emotionally moti-vated action commands are among the primary “neural correlate of consciousness,”
but also that in fleshing out this view, we should be careful not to make one of two opposite mistakes. We should take caution not to under-emphasize action by having a view of emotion that makes the emotions that motivate “actions” themselves too reac-tive. On the other hand, we should be careful not to over-emphasize action by imply-ing that any system that can act is conscious. That is where we believe it is necessary to bring in a kind of “representation” in which not only action, but also action imagery that represents the goal of an action is important.
With regard to the role of the representation of the goal of an action: To be clear, we are not saying that some end-state out in the world must be represented. If we are sitting with our feet dangling in a swimming pool and moving them back and forth, the goal that we are representing may be simply to move the foot a certain distance in a certain direction. Or in some cases the goal could be just to move the foot in such a way that moving it feels a certain way that we can remember and plan to repeat. So we are not asserting that the “goal” is necessarily some outcome that would occur outside of our own bodies. But with that caveat, we can say that action requires representing what we want to do in some way.
In a very different kind of example, when we hit a baseball, we are not really rep-resenting a specific trajectory of movement for either the bat or our arms. What we represent in this case is that the ball (which also is represented) and the bat (which is not yet consciously represented) should make contact. In this case, what we represent is something external, even almost to the exclusion of representing anything within the body. Our attention is directed to something outside of ourselves, even as we plan and execute the action.
There can also be borderline cases between action and reaction. The classic exam-ple might be when improvising jazz. In some instances, we may have the idea of what we want a phrase to sound like before we execute it. Other times, we may merely auto-matically re-act, with a habituated pattern of finger movement. And in many cases, we may rapidly alternate between those two modes of playing. In effect, we alternate between “acting” and “merely reacting.”
So when we say that consciousness can occur only in beings that act, we are not saying that these active beings must always be acting in the fullest sense. However, they are always acting in the more primitive sense we discussed above – that is, in the sense of self-organization that is implicitly oriented toward goals needed for maintaining the self-organizational system. In living beings, this involves seeking out and appropriat-ing material components (such as food) that can be used to maintain the system. That is, living self-organizing systems are always seeking homeostasis at a suitable energy level and any other activities required to enter or sustain their preferred patterns of activity. Understanding how we could act in relation to the environment, as opposed to merely re-act to it, is therefore a crucial requirement for an organism to be capable of consciousness. And this presupposes that the organism has emotion as well.
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