Emotion and mood disorders

Nothing in our subjective self-experience gives us so much the impression of individuality and uniqueness as our feelings. Not only poetry but art in general has elevated the realm of emotions to a world of its own, which seems to exist of itself without purpose.

Victor Johnston makes us abandon this view with his biopsychological theory of emotions. He points out that the fact that we have feelings and the way we feel are relentlessly determined by the evolutionary selection process. Evolution has refined our system of appraisal of our perceptions, ultimately according to reproduction advantages. Johnston's rigorous theorizing by means of Darwinian learning principles dismantles human narcissistic illusions of the uniqueness and grandeur of our moods, emotions, affects, and their reflection.

Feelings appear as mere by-products of an ever self-refining system for maximum gene survival. This painfully plausible book makes it difficult to hold anything against it; therefore, those who by all means want to stick to man's uniqueness in creation due to our emotional life should be warned against reading it.

The informed reader may consider the entry to the book somewhat tedious up to the chapter about the basics of learning mechanisms in adaptive biological systems that have survived the evolutionary selection process. Johnston starts off with Socrates' cave metaphor: what we see as "green" has no such quality equivalent in nature but is entirely made up of perceptual appraisals generated in our brain.

The seemingly arbitrary selection, for example, of a tiny band of electromagnetic wave frequencies for our perception of green has been determined by the survival benefit of those biological systems which could sense the green plant for food. Very small differences between frequency bands have to be exaggerated by the "proximal valuing system," whereas a vast amount of information about other wave frequencies remains unnoticed because it is irrelevant for the reproduction advantage. This means that there is greenness neither in nature nor in our brain. Greenness exists only as "emergent property," which is a tool for the evolutionary selection process. It just happens to emerge from the development of the organism according to its survival benefit. This emergent property can be submitted to further evolutionary molding.

The basic learning principles extracted by the author, mainly from well-known working mechanisms of the immune system and from other paradigms of evolutionary learning, include the following:

1. The system has to offer to the outside world a random variation of selectable or moldable tools-"emergent properties" like antibody proteins, organ sensations, or feelings-for selection by the evolution process. Randomness of the variations is the most essential principle. Adaptiveness and creativity, the ability to transcend the learning system itself, depend on it.

2. The repetition of this process by "entangled learning processes" of different degrees of freedom entails phylogenetic learning for long-term stability (adaptation to the day-night cycle, for example), ontogenetic learning (as in the morphological and neural network organization of the brain) to adapt to medium-range stable environmental cues like food, and functional adaptability to very volatile short-living cues for adaptation (like mimic changes in the face of a mate).