I’ve been musing on this for a few months now, while I’ve been trying to make sense of my current adventure. Neither emotion nor physical sensation maps to a simple range like happy vs sad, or pain vs pleasure. Obviously it’s more complex than that. But how is it more complex?
Having learned long ago how color is described in terms of 3 or 4d spaces, it seemed natural to look in that direction. But what are the components then?
It was quickly apparent that intensity is one of them. I guess I’d call it analogous to saturation in the HSV color model, although I suppose it could also be value. So all I had to do now was figure out the other two. Piece of cake, right?
Something emerged this morning that seems worth looking at. Shakti (aka the_divine) is the intensity. Maybe I – the_narrator – am one of the other components, and maybe my coworker the_witness completes the model.
In other words:
- the_divine – the raw energy, or amplitude
- the_narrator – the characterization of the feeling: Fear, bliss, ache, based on the training data
- the_witness – your involvement: Whether you’re fully engaged with the feeling or barely aware of it
When you’re almost in a car accident, all of us are maxxed out. All the energy, full fear and maximum engagement. When the cat does that cute thing, the_divine provides a gentle pulse, the_narrator says “awww” and the_witness notices, resulting in a chuckle.
Meditation involves high witness, low narrator and variable divine. A regret spiral is moderate divine, low witness and full-blast narrator.
Of course Claude promptly pointed out that this loosely maps to the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) model that’s already established in psychology. Except that model looks at it from the outside while mine (DNW) is from the inside.
I’ll accept that small implication of validation and sit with this for a while.
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