A Nomological Network for [I|Bliss] Theory

manipulation: prepare user with wisdom vs small-mindedness
situation     s
construct     I vs ¬I
construct     F vs M
noise source  shift & variance
Measures      F!, M!
	    

Graphical Nomological Network

Discussion

Although basic to the evolution of emotion, this claim for me originally derived from A Theory of Humor, Veatch 1998, which shows the upwelling energetic flow evident in humor experience is dependent on a non-operation or blocking of a rational emotional assessment system -- when it is persuaded of mutually contradictory conclusionsm N and V at the same time. This would follow if something like the irrational, blissful, humor-experience-like flow state is natural or underlyingly present, but normally downregulated. Then when the downregulating mechanism, blocked as it is on a self-contradiction, is forced to cease operation, the natural underlying flows become visible. In N_V Humor Theory emotional self-contradiction is the off-switch to emotional downregulation.

[I|Bliss] offers an explanation of a wide variety of important phenomena under a single rubric, following Cronbach and Meehl's (1955) original notion that "Numerous successful predictions dealing with phenotypically diverse 'criteria' give greater weight to the claim of construct validity than do fewer predictions, or predictions involving very similar behavior". Some of these are given above in the Abstract or are presented in a table in the theoretical discussion below. (Also see variously here)

To add to the variety of general or "folk" observations that seem to fall in line with [I|Bliss] Theory, a potentially wide range of controlled experiments may be imagined, which might give even stronger weight to the theory's claims and provenance.

Not just "WEIRD" subjects but across social class, education levels, age, sex, religious and national affiliations and religiosity, a variety of subjects might be brought into a mature experimental program to see if for example the universality of religious lessons that may be derived from [I|Bliss] is as many imagine.

To study this under experimental control, I offer these preliminary thoughts on experimental design in which subjects undergo personality measures (particularly for emotional rigidity and neuroticism) and are invited, one at a time, to undergo a stimulus/response experiment comprising a sequence of several prepare/prompt/respond/reset experiences.

The preparation seeks to put the subject into an ego-sensitized or alternatively hyper-egoic or anegoic state, perhaps by presenting some short scriptural vs practical text, or involving a group of subjects in a commentatorial circle on such content. A variety of content is imaginable including experiential content such as music, meditation, talks, readings.

The prompt then presents a situation which encodes both an ego challenge and a virtue challenge.

The responses should be constrained to a few options, measured and coded by protocol as to their position on (or off) the M/F continuum.

The reset will thank the subject and conclude the unit.

A review, after the entire experiment is complete, may explain the experimental purpose and findings so far.

It is likely similar or better experimental paradigms predate this writing, so my program of work should examine previous studies for tools that could be reused here.

Experimental and Theoretical Issues

This is a latent psychological construct, that the failure to attribute limiting qualities to oneself liberates the emotional system from constraint, or conversely, that the action of attributing limiting qualities to oneself imposes (both downregulatory and content-providing) constraint on the emotional system.

This construct should have a distinctive predictive validity in the real world. Yet emotions are often hidden, more so as people learn to hide them better, and certain cultures differently value the hiding and the expression in various circumstances.

Still, why should it be easy to prove a concept that has the potential to eliminate religious conflict from this world?

Measureability

If a measure measures a thing, so we know when we have some of it, the measure should be reliable. Yet with charlatans amok in this world (as all agree), any measures generally or intuitively available to the public would seem to be unreliable, since they often enable and support charlatans. Our work is cut out for us!

Reliability

Convergent Validity

For example, a wide variety of triples s,F,M, comprising situations s with presumeably-shared ego-reactive responses F and wiser responses M, may be enumerated, each providing a class of experiments which might support the program. If the same manipulation has the same effect, perhaps the construct manipulated is the same construct. In this way we hope to find convergent validity in the results across triples s,F,M, or to have reasonable explanations for the differences.

Sameness and Difference: Discriminant validity

I hope not so much to validly discriminate among religious traditions' ideas of wisdom, but to find to what degree they are actually the same.

The wise effects of all should be similar, if wisdom is a thing.

Different language for the same thing should yield similar results to speakers of the different languages.

At the same time, a key point of [I|Bliss] Theory is that a person sitting in moral judgement of others is a person who is necessarily aware of themselves as judge, and therefore is NOT in the undownregulated, blissful, serene, or flow state that their own tradition through its anegoic lessons claims to be their core teachings.

If moral judgement of others puts one in the emotional box of a limited self with the limited feeling of being a Judge it also removes one from the flow state which is supposedly the teaching of that tradition. Hence moral judgement has no place in spirituality, if I may use such terms.

Religious moral judgement is anti-spiritual.

This claim, to be experimentally verified, depends on discriminating not just egoic but judgemental from anegoic states.

Baseline concepts in the space of [I] Theory

Consider its logic and axioms.

Prerequisite, logical, constructs comprising a default, indeed tautological, understanding of the emotional process include:

• P: Perception,
• E: Emotional Evaluation,
• X: eXecution of an emotional assessment

as well as data structures:

• s: Situation or circumstance (as facts)
• a: emotional Assessment (whereby facts are laden with Attitudes)

These constructs logically characterize the emotional process. They are the result of necessary logical analysis (into the self-evidently orthogonal dimensions of external fact vs internal attitude vs action) rather than empirical study.

Any organism which reacts to its environment with any degree of situational appropriateness, that is, is capable of multiple actions or responses such as directional movement or distinguishing food from non-food, (hence this applies to paramecium as well as to human) and has evolved priority selecting and implementing systems, can be understood in light of these constructs: can be considered to itself take note of facts (P), to evaluate those facts according to a motivational hierarchy (E), and to implement its motivational assessment (X).

Even more axiomatic, I assume

• that our work here is to model organisms,
• that the modelled organism carries out this perception/action loop more or less continuously,
• that it has and repeatedly updates internal *representations* which relate to its external and internal environment,
• that to say the organism has an "inner eye" that "experiences" its perceptual representations, implies that the latter are experienced via the various "qualia of experience" which are evolved information-representing features in some sense present to the inner eye of the organism,
• that the relations of internal representations with environment are a partial correspondence, which may be termed "perception" or "belief" in the domain of fact (P and s above), and "attitude" or "reaction" or "motivational/emotional features" (E and a above) which are not strictly factual but nevertheless may be evolved conjointly with the factuality of those representations.

Hence organisms experience things and respond more or less appropriately.

This logical process model is made visible here, from which I extract the Perception/Evaluation/eXecution functionalities of any organism), considering it uncontroversial and axiomatic, to describe as "The PEX Model":

P>s | E>a | X

That is, Perception yields situational understanding, emotional Evaluation based on that yields an emotional assessment, and the emotional implementation system uses that to eXecute its motivational/emotional choices, which are the prioritization of some things over others and the alignment of internal resources toward that priority.

Adding [I]

This attribution is informational in the sense that the organism- internal representation of things includes information. Among the logical assertions made by its representations, such as, "The cat is on the mat", might be some that include reference to itself, such as "I see that cat", "That is my cat", or "I love that cat". These assertions may be more or less factual, more or less performative (made into fact by the act of their assertion), more or less supported by qualia of experience (one of which is the qualia of the non-verbal experience verbalizeable as (intransitive) "I am"), more or less motivational/emotional, more or less involved and embodied in internal and external responses and actions. These distinctions may develop relevancy but for now we may simplify:

Self-attribution is the believing thought that some aspect of the situation s bears upon self. Either that aspect is me, or is mine, or somehow says something about me.

N+V Humor Theory uses [Inner Judgement] instead of [I]

My "N+V" Humor Theory came this far, in asserting Humor occurs if and only if the organism views the situation simultaneously as (V), a subjective moral violation, and (N) not so, that is "normal" or "benign", including positive and neutral together but NOT negative.

The "+" or simultaneity condition implies a rapid, discursive, even parallel, motivational review process continuously going on in the humor-capable organism. So far so good.

And in the initial version of Bliss Theory the definition of the bliss or flow state was by means of the non-operation of the Inner Judge (a name for that motivational review process). Shut it up, you get flow state.

And perhaps that is the truest statement of Bliss Theory, but it seems that the involvement of Self Concept was so powerful in regulating emotion, that optionality of Self Attribution could almost equally capture the same contrast as optionality of Emotional Judgement. Does it seem to you that the primary activity of the Inner Judge in figuring out how to feel about and respond to things is specifically by measuring progress in the Story of My Self? If so, perhaps

[I] == [Inner Judgement].

I()

We very typically maintain a detailed and emotionally annotated mental model of ourself and its story, status and progress: that bundle of virtues and vices, memories and experiences and capabilities, of relationships and places. We do not just choose, but we are in a sense bound to use that model motivationally. To give ourselves agency in the matter, say, we use it to know how to feel about things, and to reason about plans and goals and how things are going for us. It is reasoning machinery applied to the task of reasoning about the reasoner, the organism which is doing the reasoning, and it is widely, self-servingly, and (driven by fear and panic, greed and arrogance) thought to be useful, so that we can get our emotions and lives under some kind of control, why, because it is not about mere facts, but about motivational and emotional information: how we feel about things. N and V must be basic to its categories if N+V Humor Theory is true, but we may imagine an inner logical machinery calculating N and V most basically but ramified with our associative, eventually predicative, and especially negation-asserting mental capabilities. It may apply a trichotomy of Violation, Neutral, and Positive. It certainly to makes use of the dimensions of Time, Person, Place, to yield fundamental contrasts of Past/Future, Self/Other, Near/Far (etc.?), and within such archetypal landscapes to assess not just what is going on but what is the moral/motivational/emotional assessment of what is going on, has gone on, might go on.

In short, the predicate I() can apply to anything we like, but then the particular trick of our emotional system applies. Whatever s it may be to which we say I(s), the emotional system implements the feeling associated with having that attribute. The emotional system slaves to the attribution.

This is the claim that Bliss Theory makes regarding the human emotional/motivational system:

It is DOWN-regulated.

(A spatial metaphor may help. It is as though there is a weight in the form of a hand or object or wall or ceiling, pressing down upon your heart. As if it is heavy, it is above, it is pushing down on you, and it has a certain feeling; it has the feeling of the deepest motivational knowledge, the babyhood or toddlerhood or child or preteen or teen learning that if you don't do THIS right then you'll get THAT, where THAT is the withholding of mother love, or the falling into the abyss, or some such heavy and urgent potential loss. Your mileage may vary. Then whatever success you achieve, it just postpones the damage and loss for some while, since another day brings another opportunity to fail, so to speak.)

The model here is that our motivational systems have a knowledge hierarchy, and some knowledge is more abstract, inclusive and supercategorical, and this downregulatory force or feeling is on the very abstract side, as it applies to about everything. Even happiness, is barely happiness under its heavy hand.

¬I()

That is Bliss Theory.

• At the level of reasoning, what we may write as I(s) occurs, when the organism reasons that it thereby knows something about itself.
• At the level of subjective experience, that curious qualia of an intrinsically but not contrastively "I am" experience, can be co-experienced along with other qualia relating to any aspect of any situation.
• At the level of emotion, through the emotional consistency or constraint feature claimed here, whereby self-attributional believed thought constrains emotion, we generate, we experience, we get the feeling which that thought implies for us, and not just passively but also through our motivated action we further elaborate our ongoing emotionally colored story of Me.

We have seen the assumptions, concepts, and baseline model, and central construct of this theory. Now.

Predictions of [I]

Emotions then are regulated according to the self-image of the organism. Given that capabilities range widely and that prioritized actions range narrowly, emotional regulation is largely downregulation (probably implicating GABA which operates as the chief mammalian inhibitory neurotransmitter).

[I] Theory assumes without controversy (I hope) that the organism transduces its environment into internal perceptual representations, evaluates those emotionally as to what they might signify for action or interaction or internal change of state, then executes that assessment through the operation of the emotional system in prioritizing/ activating/ aligning/ monitoring its capabilities and actions. The perception/action loop is a mere logical decomposition and applies irrespective of species or even life, since a thermostat could be analysed with the same elements, it can be seen as perceiving heat, evaluating action vs non-action, and executing its assessment.

However in the human organism, we further imagine that there is a reasoning component and that while awake it maintains a model not just of its circumstances as they evolve but of attributed limited qualities of self as evidenced by choices, actions, and results. Call this the Attributed Self, to be distinguished from the 27 definitions of Self here, for example the qualia of an intransitive "I am" awareness which does seem to be involved but not materially to this discussion. The AS is what we consider ourselves to be, and the claim is that the AS plays a role in emotional regulation. In particular, within the Perception and Evaluation phases of the Perception/Action loop, the human emotional system may optionally reason that some aspects of the circumstances are properly attributed to Self, and as a consequence of such a believing thought, the emotional valence or impact of those attributions according to the subjective moral views of the organism are implemented by the eXecution system.

If I believe I am that thing, then my emotional system executes the feeling associated with that belief.

Among the innumerable effects of the contrast I(s) vs. ¬I(s) are these:

s includes:	carrying-out-own-action	observing-own-action	status constructed face-to-face	status constructed on media	time	fear	something bad happened	something good happened
	(constrained emotion)
I(s)	self-centered action, sense of doership/ agency/ emotional capture by the progress in this action	sense of accelerated vs normal progress vs frustration	arrogance/ humiliation	constant social-media self-status-monitoring	dwelling in the past or future, missing what is going on around you	mistrust, avoidance	frustration anger hurt blame desire-for-revenge	indebtedness vs taking things for granted
	(unconstrained emotion) serenity, irrational bliss, peace of mind, flow, presence.
¬I(s)	service (the joy of selfless service, volunteer work)	flow, high performance, high presence	humility	emotional normality of childhood	in-the-now	trust	forgiveness	unconditional gratitude

Hence the construct I() mediates the relationship between the circumstances s and alternative emotional experiences of those circumstances.

I() may perhaps be measured by probes detecting the above emotional characteristics under conditions of self-construction and non-self-construction.

Is this a probe?:

• Something bad happened.
• It happened to you, how do you feel about it on a scale of 1-7?
• It happened to someone else, how do you feel about it on a scale of 1-7?

For each attribute: its emotional valence and feeling. The knowledge and capability of the system of how to implement that feeling. A hierarchy of attributes with Good/Bad near the top, and Unlimited at the very top. Guilty might be one, which is ambiguous between an attribution and a feeling.

Do you implement the feeling you bound yourself to, or do you stay in the moment, seeing what actually evolves and respond appropriately and fluidly as your time-present sense of situational appropriateness directs.

A measure theory.

On the other hand this distorting effect of a need to present self as moral and admirable may be subverted by this thought experiment since it demands imagining that you are not moral or admirable. At least.

Situation/Feeling Map

Then the prediction is, I(s) implies X(F(I(s))) whereas ¬I(s) implies X(M(s)). These, one hopes, should be borne out in measurement data.

Perhaps X(F(I(s))) is Thinking Slow while X(M(s)) is Thinking Fast, according to Kahneman. Not sure. But F() is slow, inflexible, self-centered, greedy/jealous/pompous, frankly miserable, prejudgement and existing-category-based reactivity, whether conscious of egoic threat or celebration: these might be F().

But the point in a nomological network is that I(s) vs ¬I(s) is a factor that mediates the response to s from F() to M().

P|s E|a X|(F(s,a)|M(s,a))

Noise

Variance effects might be the same, if certain folks are slammed at one end or rarely the other, yielding less variance, or if some folks are more widely varying, perhaps sensitive to the prompts of the experiment. A personality characteristic such as Neuroticism might make subjects highly sensitive if highly neurotic, or insensitive if low in neuroticism.

Experiments should therefore measure independently for neuroticism, and if possible emotional rigidity, to see if they add noise via shift or variance in outcomes.

Further work

As it happens, I have just begun programming a simple website, ScriptureTable.org, to allow users to enter random snippets of what they consider scriptures, and for other users to comment on them sharing how they understand the lesson and perhaps how it applies to their own life. At my meditation center, the original, actual, scripture table was a center of amazingly wise and elevated conversations, as compared with the other breakfast tables in the room. Perhaps ScriptureTable.com will be able to generate what amounts to experimental data fulfilling the schema described above. A bit of personal interview for the rigidity and neuroticism, then a ton of response data from different scriptural prompts from hopefully an inclusive variety of traditions. Afterward, the site may ask for feedback about the visitor's experience, to see if generally our conclusions are consistent with their impressions. Text analysis to determine the presence/absence of verbal cues of the scripture or comment writer's potentially ego-free state, could then be correlated with other visitor responses. If users wear fitbits or Apple Watches, it may be possible to correlate heartrate changes with reading events for different reading prompts. So perhaps some data and conclusions may some day come from this particular realization of these experimental ideas.

Conclusion

• I and ¬I are not fully operationalized.
• SEM is not understood.
• Not all the arrows are drawn, nor are their effects put into words.
• Manipulation checks are not described.
• Manipulations are described only quite vaguely.
• Measures are described only quite vaguely.
• A reliable way to identify and state key variables, the triples (s,F,M), is not especially clear.
• There is a mediator in the picture, but I have not read Baron and Kenny (1986) or Spencer, et al., 2005; Pirlott & MacKinnon, 2016), so I may have missed important points.

Is there traction here on the construct validity of I/¬I ?

If the manipulations truly manipulate them, will require manipulation checks.

Whether one or many hypothesized triples (s,F,M) are themselves valid: measureable (significant enough to be visible in experimental data) and reliable (general enough to stand up within and across subjects) and construct-valid (tied as intended to the I/¬I construct), that will be work for the future.

If they truly have the predicted effects, will be a matter of empirical outcomes.

If the experimental nomological network is somewhat valid, still there can be unidentified sources of noise in any corner of the picture.

False, or only partly true, are among the possible outcomes. For example, if every religion works very nicely for its adherents including while making negative moral judgments of followers of every other religion, but each gives no benefits to followers of every other doctrinally or institutionally separated tradition, that would be the collective prediction of the separated traditions, otherwise why would they keep themselves separated? If this were the outcome, it would refer us in other directions to answer why humans resort to religions to manage their emotional lives: community solidarity, moral clarity, tribal loyalty, or the desire to hate or negatively judge almost everyone, namely the Others: are those "high virtues" that could come out of this work? Certainly. On the other hand, I think we have a plausible chance here that the benefits of spirituality and religion can be found in basic features of the human emotional system, and therefore the walls between us are imaginary, even false, and in particular that our arrogant and hostile moral judgements of others have no place in a world of trust, service, humility, gratitude, or in short, inner surrender.

There are surely more possible outcomes than these! Experiments should have some exploratory aspect to them; if we do not discover more relevant dimensions as we work with these constructs, we would hardly be learning. One thing we might learn is, how are responses M different from, or perhaps superior in some senses to, responses F ? To understand this at the right level of abstraction would put us deeply and congruently into the minds of the wise. I look forward to what we might learn!