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    Silvan Tomkins' - What are Affects

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    28 views22 pages

    Tomkins - What Are Affects

    Uploaded by

    Johnbtrain
    Silvan Tomkins' - What are Affects

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    1 WHAT ARE AFFECTS? All animals “want” but only man concerns himself with the nature of his iological or spiritual creature, but because there are other ne- el ots which ete primary motivating sores. The dine aspects of himself, as of hi aspects which he may transform s which vary from those with mig 10se with maximal freed a te is concerned with some of the characteristics of the prin ‘motivational system in human being tem. Thi causality and determinism will be presented along wi nature of human freedom. What Are Affects? 35 ‘THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL AND (COMPLEXITY OF A FEEDBACK SYSTEM ‘Much ofthe debate concerning the fredom of the will arose from a conf- sion between the concepts of causality and freedom and ffom a derivative failure to distinguish motives that are more free from motives that are less free, es affect from drives, The conventional concept of causality, which generated the pseudo-problem of the feedom ofthe will, assumed that the relationship between events was essentially two-valued, either determinate or capricious, and that man’s will was therefore either slavishly determined ot capriciously free, We feel, however, that this controversy concerns man's degrees of fredom rather than the determinatenes of his behavior. The solution to this problem lies in the acceptance of both the causality principle and what may be described athe information, complexity, or degrees-of-freedom principle. ‘Two systems may be equally determined, but one be more free than the other. Thus, two computers may be equally determinate in their action, butone is more complex, able to do more, and in that sense, more free than the othe. ‘Twomen both aged sist, one of whom is healthy andthe other dying ofancer, are equally determined in their lifespan, but one has more degrees of freedom than the other. When we say that a plant's behav ‘ important the man also differ significantly in sheir complexity or degrees af fear. By ‘complexity, we mean, after Gibbs, the number of independently variable states ‘ofa sytem. Complexity isa measure which is more general than causality, since it applies equally well to formal and empirical systems. The end points of de- «grees of freedom, or complexity, are complete redundancy in which no change {spossible and complete randomness in which any change is posible. ‘The clasical view of causality considers only the two end points of this continuum. But we argue that there exists a continuum of degrees of freedom, and that where a particular system operates along such a continuum is itself determinate. A computer which can sca all the potentially relevant informa- tion, select what is most relevant, and decide which computations to carryout is far more free than an adding machine which can perform only addition on whatever numbers are fed to it. Both systems are determined, but one is fees, ‘more complex and more competent than the other. Again, fone compare (Wo chess programs, the one which considers more possiblities before it decides on cach moves the freer general strategy and the more challenging opponent fora human chess player. The problem of fee wil canbe translated into the problem 36. Shame and Its Sisters ofthe relative degrees of freedom of the human being, compared with systems which have less power or wi ‘the human being we can deter and the conditions under which he attains his highest rea tions are determinate and involve no conflict with the caus The measurement of freedom satisfy them grow. Restriction either of his wants or represents alos of freedom. FREEDOM OF THE AFFECT SYSTEM ‘man affect sytem is nicely matched in complexity both to th Iyze, storage, and motor mechanisms within the organism What Are Afects? 57 spectrum of environmental opportunities, challenges, and demands from with- out. The human being is the most complex system in nature; his superiority ‘over other animals is as much a consequence of his more complex affect system. sit is of his more complex analytical capacities. Out of the marriage of reason with affect there issues clarity with passion. Reason without affect would be From the feedback system—the value of motivational error ‘We seem to have implied that the “aims” of a human feedback system are ‘equivalent to its “wants” and these pethaps to its conscious wishes and hence to its affects, We have introduced this ambiguity to sharpen the distinction we wish to draw between affect as a control mechanism and other types of control mechanisms which also employ the feedback principle. Feedback and affect are two distinct mechanisms which may operate inde- pendent ofeach other in human beings. That neither consciousness nor affect isan essential component ofa feedback system is obvious. A thermostat works without benefit of either consciousness or affect. The majority of homeostatic What is perhaps less immediately self-evident i that affect, even when acti= ‘ated, is not always an essential part ofthe feedback assembly in human beings. ‘The infant passively enjoys or suffers the experience of his own affective responses long before he is capable of employing affect as part of a feedback ‘mechanism in instrumental behavior. He does not know “why” he is crying, that it might be stopped, or how to stop it. Even man responses are of course “caused.” There are specific conditions te them, maintain them, and reduce them, and later we will exam- ine these co At the moment we are concerned with the independence of the affect system from those central assemblies which operate on feedback principles. ‘The term central assembly refers to a mechanism involving consciousness. Messages inthe nervous system may oF may not hecame conscious. I they Become conscious, we call them report the mechanism which transmutes evidence is sill somewhat unusual, that the components or sub-systems of the 38 Shame and its Sisters nervoussystem which are functionally joined withthe transmuting mechanism by any system which is te What Are Affects? 39 making errors. The achievement of cognitive power and precision require a motivational system no les plastic and bold. Cognitive strides are limited by the motives which urge them. Cognitive erro, which i essential to cognitive learning, can be made only by one capable of commiting motivational erro, ice being wrong about hs own withes, their causes nd outcomes. “There are ofcourse alternative strategies by which information gain can be achieved. Whenever anyone knows enough to describe in advance what will happen ina domain and what can be done about ito achive a particular am, thisinformation canbe built int the structure of mechanism: a governor that ‘controls an engine's speed isan example. Such knowledge can also be wed a a ‘rogram to instruct a mechanism how to achieve an aim and how to meet a variety of contingencies. Indeed, the residues of past human learning, our habits, are essentially stored neurological programs which may be runoff with 2 minimum of earning. ‘art ofthe power ofthe human organism and its adaptability isin the fact, that in addition to innate neurological programs the human being has the capacity to lay down new programs of great complerity on the basis of risk taking, error, and achievement—programs designed to deal with contingencies ‘not necessarily universally valid but valid for his individual life. This capacity to make automatic or nearly automatic what was once voluntary, conscious and learned frees consciousness, ofthe transmuting mechanism, for new learning. But just asthe feedom to learn involves freedom for cognitive and motiva- tional erro, so the ability to develop new neurological programs, that is, the ability to use what was learned with litle or no conscious monitoring, involves the ability to automatize, and make unavailable to consciousness, both errors and contingencies which were once appropriate but which are no longer appro- priate. Insofar as what one has learned thoroughly in the pas is appropriate to the present, one is efficient; but insofar as itis inappropriate it may produce behavior which is recalcitrant to modification, despite its inappropriateness. eisimportant to distinguish the amount of information buil ino a struc- ‘or into a program, from the amount of information of a mechanism capable of generating such a quantity of information. Thus an individual whois capable of putting a coin into an automatic piano player may nat be capable of learning to play the piano with the sil ofthe recording artist. The student capable of using geometry may not have been capable of inventing it. Science as ‘4 growing quantity of information undoubtedly exceeds the quantity of infor- mation which any one Homo sapiens could have generated de nove. Our argu enough to allow motivational error concerns information gain rather than the tion, The essential quality of man as we se itis notin he ses but in the mechanism which enable him What Are Affects? 4 principle is sometimes used to undermine the reliability of legal testimony. ‘When a witness who identifies a defendant by a few outstanding characteris- tics—that he was tall, dark, and thin—is confronted with the defendant and several other tall, dark, and thin individuals in a lineup or in court, be is ‘ordinarily much less certain that he can make the positive identification. ‘The more human-like automaton, then, must be equipped to function with les certainty than our present automata. Buta critical feature entirely absent today must be introduced, The automaton must be motivated. It must be ‘equipped with a drive signal system which tells it when itis running out of cards, oil, and electricity, and it must be motivated to store energy as it now stores information. It must also be motivated to reproduce itself. Taring, who demonstrated that a self-reproducing machine was theoretically possible, was a logician, and understandably limited the problem of sef-reproduction to asex- ual techniques; bu if we are interested in the problem of human simulation, the race of automata must be perpetuated not only by knowledge but by passion. Purther, the automaton must have pain receptors which defend its integrity {from overzealous investigators who would run it too long and too continu- equipped with receptors which are activated by a variety of noxious conditions which in turn produce messages possessing priority over the ongoing program and which will prompt both programmed (reflex) responses to the pain and ‘more general, instrumental responses ifthe programmed responses should not succeed in turning off the pain messages. ‘Our automaton would now have a drive system. The possession of such a drive system would not per se radically increase the freedom of this automaton ‘over contemporary models, but it would more closely resemble a living organ- does this mean in terms ofa specific program? There must be built into such a umber of responses which have self-rewarding and self-punishing inherently unacceptable. These are essentially aesthetic characteristics of the affective responses—and in one sense no further reducible. ust asthe experi- cence of redness could not be further described to a color-blind man, so the particular qualities of excitement, joy, fear, sadness, shame, and anger cannot be further described if one is missing the necessary effector and receptor appara- 442 Shame and Its Sisters What Are Affects? 43, special self-rewarding responses, such asthe smile, tothe reception of messages which indicated the presence of machines ike himself. ‘Such automata would be much more interesting than our present com- puters, but they would also have certain disadvantages. They would be capable ‘of not computing for the designer for long periods of time when other com- puters were sending messages to them; when they were afraid of overly severe {fluctuations in their sources of electricity; when having tried unsuccessfully to solve then insoluble problems, they became depressed; or when they became ‘manic with overweening false confidence. In short, they would represent not the disembodied intelligence of an auxiliary brain but a mechanical intelligence intimately wed to the automaton’s own complex purposes. ‘The fragmentation and amplification of man's capacities by automata has. ben the rule: the microscope was a visual amplifier, the radio a speech and an intelligence amplifier. The next and the final development of simulation will, ‘be an integrated automaton—with microscopic and telescopic lenses and sonar ‘ears, with atomie powered arms and legs, with a complex feedback circuitry powered by a generalizing intelligence obeying equally general motives having. the characteristics of human affects. Societies of such automata would re- produce and care for the young automata. How friendly or hostile to man they ‘might become would depend on the design of the relative thresholds of these two affects and the conditions under which thei circuitry was activated. Independence of mages (purposes) and affect ‘The importance of the independent variability ofthe affect system from ‘other systems, and particularly from the central assembly as it employs the feedback principle, isa special case of what we have argued isthe primary technique by which the human being generates complexity, ie, the incom- pletely overlapping central assemblies. 1 will be recalled that the central assembly consists of the transmuting ‘mechanism plus those other components of the nervous system which are functionally joined tothe transmuting mechanism at the moment, and that the transmuting mechanism is the mechanism that transmutes messages in the nervous system into conscious form or reports. By the term “incompletely overlapping central assemblies” we mean that the components of differing central assemblies, that is, the central assembly at diferent moments in time, willin parte the same and in part be diferent. Similarly, the set of messagesin ‘any component of the central assembly may be in part the same and in part 444, Shame and Is Sisters Afferent at differing moments in time. Finally, we also mean by incompletely ‘overlapping assembly that there are parts of each component which may re- in unconscious, as when two sounds ut are not differentiated with respect to ‘The ultimate combinations in the human being of affect with the receptor, analyze, storage, and effector systems produces a much more complex set of, from a set of elements when they are language. joverned by a feedback system in which ing information about the difference independent of affects, and affects for dependence on the feedback system, feedback system i greatest in infancy. What Are Affects? 45 In the case of memory, the model is the external world as it once existed, re

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