Emotion and the Dynamics of Representation Use
23 Mar 2026 - 23 Mar 2026
- Emotion and the Dynamics of Representation Use, a position paper I wrote for a workshop on emotions in AI in 1992. It's pretty half-assed, but the ideas are still interesting, at least to me.
- I'd absorbed critiques of representationalism from Agre and Chapman, but didn't accept their eliminitivism. So I wanted to come up with a way of thinking about representation that made sense.
- Also had been working with Tinbergen-esque theories of animal behavior, and was kind of in the mode of looking for simple cognitive mechanisms that were more complex than mere reflexes but made evolutionary sense.
- And was working under Marvin Minsky, trying to boil down aspects of his Society of Mind theory (which itself was rooted in Tinbergen and Freud) into something simple enough for me to understand and implement.
- I coined the term "enactive representation", perhaps influenced by The Embodied Mind. Or rather I thought I was making it up, but it was used by Jerome Bruner to mean pretty much the same thing.
Situated action theory [Agre and Chapman 1987] includes the idea of deictic representation, which combines this sort of “leaning-on- the-world” with the language of representation. It can be argued whether such constructs are really representational since they don’t involve mental state; they are more a way of talking about the relationship between the world and an actor’s dynamics.
The enactive view builds on the deictic view and attempts to integrate representations of things that aren’t actually available to the senses. The primary use of representation is imaginative, in that it is used to perceive what isn’t actually at hand. An enactive representer imaginatively re-enacts a past action in order to predict the result. Action becomes not only a matter of adaptive reaction to the world (as it is in situated action systems) but of reacting to imaginings about the world's future.
- Since then "enactive cognition" has become a minor academic industry; as is often the case, I was ahead of the curve but didn't bother to ride the wave.
- Suggests that the mechanisms I propose might underlie Freudian repression. This is a little embarrassing to read now, because Freud himself had very elaborately described models of how repression worked and what the dynamics of the machinery might be, which I guess I was ignorant of.
Revisiting key ideas
- Enactive Representation
- The idea that basic representation is tightly linked to motor activity and recreating past states. I thought I was inventing this term
- Schemas (in the Drescher/Piagaet sense)
- Learning schemas
- Using schemas – the imaginal
- Emotion
- as valenced reaction to imagined futures
- Conflict
- Displacement activities, ritual, non-compromise
- Chaining
- The above is a sort of primitive mechanism for anticipating future states; this theorizes (very briefly) about how those mechamisms can be stiched together for more complicated intelligent action.
- Summary
- Emotion and cognition are deeply intertwined
- Representation is grounded in experience; facts and objectivity are later developments at best
- Extensions and speculations
- Object relations theory (psychoanalysis)
- The other, the self, and Kegan stage theory
- Chaining depends on self-representation
- Complex emotions from complex self/other representations
Furthur
- The predictive moment: reverie, connection and predictive processing (relates PP to Bion's psychoanalytic theory)
- Blaise Agüera y Arcas has talked of similar things in an AI context eg in Do Large Language Models Understand Us? | Daedalus | MIT Press
The idea of having a social relationship with oneself might seem counterintuitive, or just superfluous. Why would we need to construct models of ourselves if we already are ourselves? One reason is that we are no more aware of most of what actually happens in our own brains than we are of anyone else's.