Making sense of feelings.

Internal feeling states like pain, hunger, and thirst are often assumed to directly cause behaviors essential for survival, but this 'causal assumption' conflicts with the standard neuroscientific view of motor action. The authors argue that denying feelings cause behavior does not necessarily lead to epiphenomenalism, which would contradict evolutionary biology. Instead, they propose the 'sense making sense' hypothesis: the function of subjective experience is not to cause behavior but to explain it, in a restricted sense. This framework integrates neural computations for motor control, feelings, and explanatory processes to account for how feelings contribute to our understanding of why we act.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Internal feeling states such as pain, hunger, and thirst are widely assumed to be drivers of behaviours essential for homeostasis and animal survival. Call this the 'causal assumption'. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the causal assumption is incompatible with the standard view of motor action in neuroscience. While there is a well-known explanatory gap between neural activity and feelings, there is also a disjuncture in the reverse direction-what role, if any, do feelings play in animals if not to cause behaviour? To deny that feelings cause behaviours might thus seem to presage epiphenomenalism-the idea that subjective experiences, including feelings, are inert, emergent and, on some views, non-physical properties of brain processes. Since epiphenomenalism is antagonistic to fundamental commitments of evolutionary biology, the view developed here challenges the standard view about the function of feelings without denying that feelings have a function. Instead, we introduce the 'sense making sense' hypothesis-the idea that the function of subjective experience is not to cause behaviour, but to explain, in a restricted but still useful sense of 'explanation'. A plausible framework is derived that integrates commonly accepted neural computations to blend motor control, feelings, and explanatory processes to make sense of the way feelings are integrated into our sense of how and why we do and what we do.