Affect Theory

What Silvan Tomkins Might Say: My Tomkins Talk

I fed the transcript of the following video of my talk to the Tomkins organization to an AI proxy of Silvan Tomkins and instructed it: Filter out everything not related to affect theory. Distill the affect-order distinctions being made. Point by point, use Tomkins to comment on them.  What Silvan Tomkins might say: An

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What’s The Role of Learning In The Meanings of Feelings?

What are feelings? What is the difference between a feeling and a feeling we recognize? Can a feeling have meaning without prior learning? Feelings are changes in the lived state of an organism. They are not, first of all, ideas about experience. They are the experience becoming different from within: tightening, opening, dread, ease, hurt,

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What Calabrese and Tomkins Might Say: Meta-tations

  Tangent migrations most often begin when a memory evoked in the current stream of attention overpowers the emotional motive of the stream and repurposes attention and memory according to relevance with the evoked memory rather than to the original context and purpose in the stream that evoked the memory. Where this happens without our

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Tomkins and Calabrese on Hormesis Psychology Paper

Edward Calabrese shared a newly released paper on hormesis and psychology. Hormesis-psychology-1 What Silvan Tomkins might say: You have here, in effect, a psychological hormesis study: not of radiation or toxins, but of ordinary parental misattunement-unresponsiveness, detachment, intrusiveness, psychological control-and its impact on children’s emotional life. The authors show that moderate levels of such adversity

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Dialogues in dAilogues: Tomkins and Calabrese – Affects and Hormetics

After loading the main dAilogue primer, I uploaded the Silvan Tomkins and Edward Calabrese primer extensions, and instructed ChatGpt to participate in the dAilogue in a way representing both of their minds and mental models.  I then asked: How would a dialogue between Silvan Tomkins and Edward Calabrese translate affect theory into hormesis and hormesis

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Unlearning Pain with Tomkins and Calabrese

This dAilogue began as an exploration of pain but led to a very interesting reframing of how our affective hebbian learning works and the learned cause of a great deal of our pain. Source dAilogue: https://chatgpt.com/share/691f9dc5-05a8-8008-9f82-d3f8f01b96f4 After loading the main dAilogue primer I uploaded the Silvan Tomkins (affect science) and Edward Calabrese (health science) primer

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RE: “Scientists Found the Potential Off Button for Stopping Chronic Pain”

Still preclinical, but now backed by convergent 2018→2025 evidence, PBN Y1R is the central, non-opioid switch for enduring pain. Do you understand the thesis implicit in: “Scientists Found the Potential Off Button for Stopping Chronic Pain”: Nicholas Betley from the University of Pennsylvania has discovered that a previously overlooked group of neurons in the parabrachial

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Emotional Learning

Our learning makes our animal emotionality human. Whatever is important is only important because it’s emotionally important. Whatever is emotionally important is only emotionally important because we learned it to be. Though emotion has is own biological logic, the context it’s operating within is always learned. What we feel as emotionally important is not an

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What Makes What’s Relevant Relevant

We can’t use human ways of thinking about knowing to explain AI’s process of tokening. AI’s have semantically arbitrary, mechanical rather semantic, meaning space extent limits. An AI user’s bandwidth limits (technologically or customer type) affect the “depth” of context informing the tokening. That’s what makes AIs seem so absurd – as if they are

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