on 05-Jun-2020 (Fri)

The best way to solve a problem is to already know a solution for it

we can't usually say what anything is: we can only describe what something is like,

many feelings we think of as "positive" are partly based on censoring aspects of things that we might otherwise think of as negative. Thus a certain situation could seem "pleasant" to mental processes that are currently active, but might seem quite unpleasant to other processes that are currently being suppressed; example: parents' love

Each Critic in this diagram can recognize a certain species of "Prob- lem Type." When a Critic sees enough evidence that you now are facing its type of problem, then that Critic will activate what we shall call a "Selector," which tries to start up a set of resources that it has learned is likely to act as a Way to Think that may help in this situation.

Damasio about Elliot: "I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, and no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning."

Elliot could not finish a task like sorting documents, he could read a single document for hours.

This led Damasio to suggest that "reduced emotion and feeling might play a role in Elliot's decision-making failures." However, I'm inclined to turn that around to suggest that it was Elliot's new inability to make such deci- sions that reduced his range of emotions and feelings. For perhaps what got damaged in Elliot's brain were mainly the Critics (or their output connec- tions) that formerly set off the processes that we recognize as emotional states. For now he has lost those precious cascades—and, hence, the emo- tions that he once displayed—because he no longer can use those Critics to choose which emotional states to use.