Excellent piece Alexey- lots to think about here. Wondering about implications for clinical work? Particularly affective states as context for declarative consciousness? I have a lot of reading to do!!
Thank you, Paul. Nice example, yes, affective states are powerful and in "state-dependent learning" way everything is affected - how we recall, interpret memories, make decisions, perceive the world, predict. (In FEP terms, this is associated with precisions, as you know.)
Take investment decisions for example, in the giddy, bubbly, overly optimistic states (e.g. "can't go wrong with buying nvidia, no matter the price") people become inappropriately risk tolerant and buy too much at high prices.
On the flip side, any time we build context-independent, universal categories with bright lines, be it DSM categories or brain regions, or even affective neuroscience categories, e.g. PANIC - we are potentially at some risk of oversimplifying. What we get is a sense of clarity, it's easier to think this way and that's not nothing especially in a tundra, but if someone were to push us and ask - where exactly is the boundary of PANIC, or of the insula, or of generalized anxiety disorder? Not so easy to answer. We believe in one, but it's very hard, and at times even impossible to reliably draw it.
Mentally, we have created "a thing" an mental object that we think is clearly differentiated from everything else. Sometimes it is appropriate (as in we all have hearts), sometimes - not so much.
So what I hope is that Chris's work allows us to be more careful with assuming that separability is always possible, and with doing it - separating things, carving nature at its joints, without asking if the necessary condition (contextuality) for that was met.
Excellent piece Alexey- lots to think about here. Wondering about implications for clinical work? Particularly affective states as context for declarative consciousness? I have a lot of reading to do!!
Thank you, Paul. Nice example, yes, affective states are powerful and in "state-dependent learning" way everything is affected - how we recall, interpret memories, make decisions, perceive the world, predict. (In FEP terms, this is associated with precisions, as you know.)
Take investment decisions for example, in the giddy, bubbly, overly optimistic states (e.g. "can't go wrong with buying nvidia, no matter the price") people become inappropriately risk tolerant and buy too much at high prices.
On the flip side, any time we build context-independent, universal categories with bright lines, be it DSM categories or brain regions, or even affective neuroscience categories, e.g. PANIC - we are potentially at some risk of oversimplifying. What we get is a sense of clarity, it's easier to think this way and that's not nothing especially in a tundra, but if someone were to push us and ask - where exactly is the boundary of PANIC, or of the insula, or of generalized anxiety disorder? Not so easy to answer. We believe in one, but it's very hard, and at times even impossible to reliably draw it.
Mentally, we have created "a thing" an mental object that we think is clearly differentiated from everything else. Sometimes it is appropriate (as in we all have hearts), sometimes - not so much.
So what I hope is that Chris's work allows us to be more careful with assuming that separability is always possible, and with doing it - separating things, carving nature at its joints, without asking if the necessary condition (contextuality) for that was met.