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It’s tempting to try to eliminate this mistake class by insisting that the only legitimate kind of belief is an anticipation of sensory experience. But the world does, in fact, contain much that is not sensed directly. We don’t see the atoms underlying the brick, but the atoms are in fact there. There is a floor beneath your feet, but you don’t experience the floor directly; you see the light reflected from the floor, or rather, you see what your retina and visual cortex have processed of that light. To infer the floor from seeing the floor is to step back

"Emotion concepts are disanalogous to that. If you have learned from culture that people respond to the death of a loved one by getting sleepy, that might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are not purely a passive observer of your facial expressions, physiological arousal, etc.—and that includes not only voluntary actions but even “involuntary” things like facial expressions, crying, etc.

Now, on my models, as in Section 2.3 above, there are “innate behaviors” implemented by cell groups in the hypothalamus and brainstem, and there are also predict... (read more)