Towards an Affective Quality Space

Abstract

In this paper I lay the foundations for the construction of an affective quality space. I begin by outlining what quality spaces are, and how they have been constructed for sensory qualities across different perceptual modalities. I then turn to tackle four obstacles that an affective quality space might face that would make an affective quality space unfeasible. After showing these obstacles to be surmountable, I propose a number of conditions and methodological constraints that should be satisfied in attempts to construct an affective quality space. Before concluding, I detail the high explanatory pay-off such a project promises.

The Human Affectome

“…Affective phenomena, to both academics and laypeople, can be felt ( Chalmers, 1997 ; Craig, 2002 ; Frijda, 1986 ; Lambie and Marcel, 2002 ; Lange, 1885 ; Leighton, 1985 ; Nagel, 1974 ; Pugmire, 1998 ; Scherer, 1982b ; Schwarz and Clore, 2007 ; James, 1890 ; Schwarz and Clore, 1988 ; Panksepp, 2008 ; Barrett, 2005 ; Barrett et al, 2007; Izard, 2010b ; Deonna and Scherer, 2010 ; Schwarz, 2012 ; Damasio and Carvalho, 2013 ; Elpidorou and Freeman, 2014 ; Deonna and Teroni, 2017 ; LeDoux and Brown, 2017 ; Strigo and Craig, 2016 ; LeDoux and Hofmann, 2018 ; Adolphs et al, 2019 ; Paul et al, 2020 ; LeDoux, 2012 , 2015 , 2023 ; Szanto and Landweer, 2020 ; Álvarez-González, 2023 ; Davidson and Sutton, 1995 ; Cromwell and Lowe, 2022 , this issue; Cromwell and Papadelis, 2022 , this issue). We experience them over a duration of time ( episodes ) ( Tye, 2003 ; Wollheim, 1999 ; Goldie, 2000 ; Locke, 1847 ; Levine, 1983 ; Hardin, 1988 ; Stein et al, 1993 ), how they feel has qualities ( qualia ) ( Nagel, 1974 ; Chalmers, 1997 ; Silva, 2023 ), and they tend to mean something to us when we feel them, usually about how our concerns relate to objects, either physical or mental, such as things, people, and situations ( intentionality ) ( Brentano, 2012 ; Tye, 2014 ; Deonna and Teroni, 2012 ). This aspect of meaning obliges us to consider not only the meaning of each individual affective experience, but also how different meanings of affective experiences relate to each other in an organized way ( phenomenology ) ( Heidegger, 1967 ; Husserl and Dumme...…”

Three Comments in Case of a Structural Turn in Consciousness Science

“…In recent years, the idea of using mathematical spaces, or mathematical structure more generally, 1 to go beyond verbal descriptions and simple formalisations have started to sprout in virtually every discipline involved in the scientific quest to understand consciousness. Following pioneering work by Austen Clark [7] and David Rosenthal [58], mathematical spaces are now applied in philosophy [8,9,13,15,43,44,56,57,59,11,45,37,53,53,80,6,68,2], neuroscience [72,70,82,42,46,17,52,19,28,75,83,18], cognitive science [24,61,23,51], psychology [36,40,54,81] and mathematical consciousness science [16,32,69,55,47,48,…”