Xenakis I., Arnellos A. & Darzentas J. (2011). Emotions and their Functional Role in Aesthetic Judgment Interactivist Summer Institute 2011, Syros, Greece
[Abstract]
As an autonomous agent attempts to increase his autonomy, he always tries to advance the complexity of the functions he uses in order to be able to serve his final decisions. In autonomous agents with a greater complexity that the basic one, emotional activity functions as a feedback system or a monitor mechanism that serves the regulation of the effectiveness of a potential or chosen interaction.
For most theorists emotions are highly related to the behavior as they are bound with agent's goals and biological needs. Generally, emotions with a positive value (euphoric) are associated with the attainment of a goal, leading to decisions that allow an agent to continue with its current plan. In contrast, emotions with negative values (dysphoric) emerge when the agent has problems with the ongoing plans and fails to achieve the desired goals. Those values lead to problem-solving mechanisms reconsidering the existing goal structures in order to reconstruct new plans.
Many aesthetic theorists have proposed that there are basic emotional states such as pleasure or pain, which are connected, some of them a priori, with beauty or ugliness. William James was the first to distinguish between a primary and a secondary layer of emotional response to aesthetic stimuli. The primary layer consists of subtle feelings, by which, pleasure is elicited through harmonious combinations of sensational experiences (e.g. lines, colors, and sounds). The secondary pleasure offers the elegance in aesthetic taste. Other authors add to pleasure and pain a value character, which is associated with our preferences, including aesthetic ones, to provide an explanation to what we like or dislike, while others put the aesthetic emotions in the top of emotional pyramid. Frijda offers also a definition of affect, which is referred to hedonic experience as an experience of pleasure or pain.
Exploring emotions, their evolutionary origin and their basic neurobiological substratum, our aim in this paper is to detect the way in which emotions responsible for an aesthetic response (pleasure and pain) are emerged and how they eventually affect the formation of aesthetic decision. As such, we propose a model of minimal functionality of emotions that are also related to minimal aesthetic decisions that probably constitute the formation of aesthetic judgment. Particularly, we propose a naturalized explanation mostly based on Bickhard's interactivist model of emergent representation, in order to detect the way in which emotions responsible for an aesthetic response are emerged and how they eventually affect the formation of aesthetic judgment. According to the interactive model of representation, emotions are implicitly associated to representations and in general, to the transformation of the factual knowledge in complex autonomous agents.
Taking into account also Damasio's neurological evidences about mental images, emotional activity and their relations to what the agent likes or not, we argue that aesthetic meaning is based on dynamic changes, which occurred in the agent's inner structure when he interacts with the physical structure of an object. Emotions are an outcome of a signal mechanism, which detects those differentiations of the environmental conditions and warn the agent for possible failures of those conditions. The signaling devices located in agent's structure, aid the construction of neural patterns resulting in possible emotional values.
As such, we strongly believe that the formation of aesthetic meaning could also be ascribed not only in the purely conscious part of the respective interactive process, but also in the respective emotional mechanism.
Particularly, in the suggested model, aesthetic emotions are considered as functions that serve an evaluation mechanism, as the agent tries to resolve the interactive uncertainty in a given interaction. Consequently, we consider the aesthetic emotional states of pleasure and pain as a functional indication that strengthens or weakens the anticipation for the resolution of the dynamic uncertainty emerged in the specific interaction. Overall, this process serves the maintenance of the autonomy and the stability of the agent, since it functions as a detecting mechanism that could prevent the interactive error.
The proposed model of such a signal/evaluation mechanism, which leads to emotional aesthetic values, is structured upon the evidence of the appraisal theory of emotions, as it has been introduced by Lazarous and Frijda. Appraisal theory is also used as a vehicle for the detection of specific functions by which the evaluation mechanism is related to the elicitation of the aesthetic emotional meaning.
The ideally ultimate aesthetic verdict is a much more complex process than the one described and analyzed in the suggested minimal model. According to this model, the aesthetic judgment has to resolve also qualitative aspects of the emergent aesthetic emotions, which in turn construct more complex appraisal structures. Consequently, aesthetic emotions are more than what we use to name as pleasurable or painful; they have qualitative differentiations (e.g. intensity), which are causally dependent on the dynamic character of appraisal.
The whole approach to explore the functional significance of aesthetic emotions, which affect the complex aesthetic judgment is developed apart from non-naturalized explanations and abstract philosophical terms like beauty, sublime, aesthetic sensitivity, etc. that aesthetic philosophy has proposed so far as notions with a central role in aesthetic experience.
In contrast, according to the proposed model we suggest that:
• The aesthetic elicitation is always a goal-related attribution, in contrary with the more dominant and philosophical approach to aesthetic theory that claims for disinterestedness of pleasure (free of satisfaction), when the agent is about to call something beautiful.
• Considering that the appraisal of an event takes place prior to the outcome of the aesthetic emotion, we could conclude that aesthetics, in general, and aesthetic judgment, in particular, is not an a priori mysterious process and most probably, but refers to processes/mechanisms, which result in emergent outcomes with particular characteristics.
• Autonomy is a precondition for the agent to produce aesthetic emotions. The contrary is not true.
• Aesthetic emotions have also a functional role that provides new motives and new knowledge. The knowledge of new aesthetic meanings and new aesthetic judgments, form the basis for further aesthetic emotions, judgments, and actions.
• The dynamic character of the appraisal process confirms the philosophical claim for the subjectivity of the aesthetic judgment. Particularly, the same cognitive agent in different instants of the same interaction process could elicit different aesthetic judgments even if we consider the environment as consistent.
Consequently, we consider the aesthetic emotional values of pleasure and pain as a functional indication that strengthens or weakens the anticipation for the resolution of the dynamic uncertainty emerged in the specific interaction. Those aesthetic indications partly form, in a fundamental level, the elicitation of the aesthetic experience.
