CONSCIOUSNESS

112 2. Neuroscience
141 Beyond the Binding Problem: Toward an Experiential Model of Nested Binding
Levels to Integrate the Components of Experience James Clement Van Pelt
(Initiative In Religion/Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT)
If the binding of sensory components into a single sense (e.g. vision) is mysterious, an
incalculably greater mystery is the means by which all the senses bind together into a unified
sensory totality, i.e. the sensorium – “the array of senses, feelings, and bodily orientations”
through which sentient beings experience the world and themselves. The transformation between
those two binding levels – from sensory components to senses, and from senses to
sensorium – implies a succession of such transformations and levels, each extended from the
previous level and nested within the next. In that progression, the level beyond the binding
that produces the sensorium is the occasion at which the sensorium is bound with its mental
equivalent comprising memories and other associations, thoughts and concepts, and mental
(not physical) sensations. The sensorium and its mental equivalent interact to produce, and
are bound together with, their affective equivalent, i.e. the unified experiential sphere of emotional
and other “feelings’ that are neither purely physical nor purely mental, including states
sometimes called subtle for which no names may exist. The parallel processing of sensory,
mental, and affective components into a unified appearance may suggests that the distinction
usually made between physical/neural binding and metaphysical/ experiential binding may be
false, since (for example) the binding of a shape, a color, and a texture together to present a
single image requires some degree of recognition, and hence experience, to move the process
to the next cognitive step. Likewise, the metaphor of a progression of levels from physical
substrate to experienced appearance could be misleading, since the binding of the senses,
feelings, and mental contents happens simultaneously, interactively, and in parallel such that
patterns and meanings are identified along the full continuum of emerging experience. For
example, the sensation of burning, the feeling of alarm, and the intention of withdrawing one’s
hand from the stove are developed as discrete yet interwoven strands, allowing the protective
reaction to occur prior to the final production of the integrated appearance. This may contradict
the representation model of consciousness asserting that the sensorium must present its
appearance prior to affective or mental responses. Certain questions present themselves. Is
there a “common sense” (sensus communi) into which the discrete senses are translated, as
implied by synesthesia? Is the binding process at each level partly telic, i.e. is the causal direction
entirely “bottom up” or is the binding constrained by prehension of how the components
are related as much as by the components themselves? How many steps altogether compose
the entire binding progression? Is basic sensory binding (e.g. vision) the fundamental level in
the process, or is there an even more fundamental binding prior to that? What does the experience
of unbinding, by volition or fatigue, and the effort required to “hold things together”
between sleep periods, indicate about the separability of experience from the experiencer?
This presentation explores such issues and the first-person techniques that can be employed
to trace the experiential correlates of the underlying neurology toward the development of an
experiential model of the multilevel binding process. P2
2.13 Emotion
142 A Computational Model of Emotions: Anxiety and Fear Peter Raulefs
(QIQCS, Santa Clara, CA)
In studying emotions, we consider [1,2,3]: (1) The phenomenology as described by cognitive,
behavioral, and physiological manifestations of emotional experiences. (2) Mental states
established by neurobiological processes that relate to emotional experiences. (3) Neurobiological
processes that instantiate emotional experiences. We propose a computational framework
used to construct models of emotion to explain what emotions are, how they evolve,
and how they result in observable manifestations. We show how such models provide testable
theories of emotion, and enable simulations of emotional processes with testable predictions
of behavioral responses to sensory and cognitive stimuli evoking emotions. The computational
framework provides (a) Computational primitives that include an abstract state space,
operators to implement state transitions, and combinators to aggregate operators into pro-