biological emotions and laughing goldfish

Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychology professor at Northeastern University, reduces the emotional states of being into four categories, in her book, How Emotions Are Made (Pan Macmillan, 2017). These four proto-emotions are, in essence, the messages your brain derives from your nervous system, the pure biological pulses that ultimately guide our relationship with the world around us:

Pleasantness
Unpleasantness
Arousal
Calmness

Everything else, from happiness to sadness to disgust and so on, says Barrett, are learned reactions. Passion is culturally transmitted.

In identifying these raw materials of emotion, we might draw a closer understanding of the experience of that-which-is-not-human, even perhaps that-which-is-not-mammal, as pleasant — even mildly arousing — is the notion that this may be an indication of some broader universality.

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Here is one of my favorite Chuang Tzu stories, which for me settles any argument over the existence of universal experience, and imparts the listener to "trust their gut" on this matter. Our relationship with the world around us is much tighter than we tend to consciously acknowledge:

Two old friends were crossing a bridge over a pond. One paused to look down, and noticed a school of goldfish swimming below. "Look, how those goldfish are playing and laughing!" His friend glanced down, nodded, and then replied, "How is it you know these fish are experiencing some form of happiness? Maybe they are simply swimming in the fashion that such fish swim, not happy, but neutral, and that you are imagining their emotion? You can never ask a fish! Does it not seem foolish to you to ascribe human feelings to simple creatures?"

His friend thought about this for a little while, peered one more time at the fish below, and then, waving his friend forward on their walk mentioned, "I know those fish are happy because I, too, have known happiness."

——

I used this story to put the 26 forms of cognitive bias into context, as well, "Cognitive Bias and the Laughing Goldfish."

As I click "publish" on this post, two blue jays are squealing in the flower box outside my window. They sound aroused!

Measuring Relatively

If the size of an ounce were to fluctuate from market to market, store to store, as it often did before the standardization efforts of the 18th Century, the unit's utility would diminish, steeply. We would do as well to use "a handful" to measure and trade things. Big handed people would all get a leg up.

By definition, a unit of measurement is a standardized constant.

So it's interesting to come across a unit of measure that does change relative to circumstances and maintains its usefulness. Currency is an one example of a fluctuating measurement system.

Here is an old Chinese system for measuring the size and space of dwellings:

"A chien is a unit of space with a constant relationship between height, width, and length--the space between the supporting pillars, the floor, the ceiling. In a large house, therefore, the chein is large and in a small house, small. The usual house in this part of China was three or five chien. Some of the smaller side houses might be two chien. The partitions from pillar to pillar, front to back, could be put in or taken out at will. A room could be from one to five chien. In poor families, a chien tended to be a room."
from a footnote in "A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman" by Ida Pruitt as told by Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai

I will update this post when I recover information pertaining to a system of time measurement in which the time between sunrise and sunset is the same number of hours everyday, every season. Not only does the length of an hour change every day, but day hours are different from night hours.

Eustatic Excursions and Hyposometric Illusion

Sea level in not a place; it is an ideal that assumes still seas, unmoved by tides, enwrapping a perfectly spherical planet, damping the shores of immobile continents. Neither are the seas' distribution uniform nor our globe near regular. The ocean, you'll see on certain days, makes no distinction between itself and the atmosphere; the horizon is a haze; there is no surface. Our scrutiny is foiled.

Eustasy is the mean average of ocean levels, abstracted from local conditions, and today is measured by satellite networks and figured out by computerized algorithm. It's constantly changing. Most obvious is the 24 hour 54 minute tidal cycle brought on by the ocean's relationship to the gravitational force of the moon, but also affected by the sun and other heavenly bodies nearby.

The freezing and thawing of water globally shrinks and swells the ocean by several hundred meters over the epochs. But long term eustasy becomes indiscernable when considering hard-to-trace variations caused by the epierogenic--or bobbing--motion of the continental plates. Likewise, the shoreline travels up and down as the lands move, grow, and collapse. The density, and thus surface, of the ocean changes with tidal influences as well as long term changes in oceanic temperature and large-scale atmospheric and seismic pressures enacted from above and below. The accumulation rate of sentiment at the bottom of the sea varies from minute to minute; the deep seaman's bob gets buried rather quickly.

Again, if we want to believe anything, we must have faith in an unchanging, singular center, in infinitesimal point, a true center of the Earth, from which to pull our virtual tape measures, and read the height of the seas. Is there a gravitational balancing point in the heart of this mass? If so, could this spot be anything if not miraculous?

Nine Taxonomical Universals

Each human culture develops its own set of categories and classifications for the natural world. Linnaeus classified the raccoon, for instance, as a bear, placing it in the genus Ursus. The raccoon was later moved to its own genus, Procyon, which means "dog-like" though many people think of them as rodents, more closely associated with a badger, opossom or weasel. Before European contact, some groups of Native Americans understood the raccoon to be a cousin of Man.

It is appropriate, here, to distinguish between folk taxonomies and scientific taxonomy inasmuch as our current scientific classifications are the result of broad consensus amongst current practitioners of the art of naming (not without controversy, of course). But what is interesting is that, independent of this formal body of knowledge, we automatically and naturally make associations and categorize things around us.

We all agree, scientist and non-scientist, that a raccoon is a mammal. Everyone on Earth, it turns out, makes the mammalian distinction, just as we all agree that if it has fins and swims in the sea, it's a fish (in most cases).

Cecil Brown, a linguistic anthropologist at Northern Illinois University, and expert in lexical acculturation, language universals, and the comparative study of Mayan languages, has researched folk taxonomies in 188 languages, and concluded that there are nine universal classifications for living things.

Fish

Birds

Snakes

Mammals

Wugs (aka worms and insects)

Trees

Vines

Herbs

Bushes

Carol Yoon recently published a fascinating account of the history of taxonomy titled, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Science and Instinct, (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).

7.83 HERTZ

Base Resonance of the Earth