Conceptual knowledge and its validation by emotion in the brain – the common center of our thinking, and the philosophical self
Keira Autera UA’27 and Jim Stellar
The brain, particularly the neocortex, we say, is the seat of cognitive conceptual knowledge. But it is also accompanied by a limbic system that comments on that conceptual knowledge’s value. In many ways, the limbic system influences what we know to be our own mental life. We think that happens in the frontal cortex, and it produces knowledge that is interpretive and complex. How we understand process, encode, and understand logic through information processing is shown by the example of Antonio Damasio’s first book Descartes Error. Here Damisao states that Descartes said, “I think therefore I am,” but Damisao said essentially the way it works is that I feel, therefore I can think, therefore I am.
Our brain’s amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and other limbic structures influence how we learn and perceive our cognitive thinking, and this is where we say our cognition becomes defined. For example, features of stimuli are perceived by the visual cortex, enabling us to use our conscious, cognitive, symbolic logic, and abstract reasoning to decipher what is happening – e.g. to recognize a face or even just see an object as being on a table and not as part of that table. This such information processing extends to process our very complex thoughts, e.g, language. That leads us to the next question of how we develop a sense of our perception of emotion, particularly through our direct experience, i.e. the way college students process who we think we are and what we want to do with our careers. We think this happens by integration of our conceptual knowledge and planning in the neocortex with the above-mentioned value input from our limbic system after a direct experience, e.g. working in a law firm on an internship to a student interested in the law.
In this essay, we are calling this integration the common center of our thinking, the integration point between cognition and emotion, and the way we get to defining ourselves.
Within this concept of the brain’s common center is this prime limbic connection that allows for the regulation of our cognitive processes. Structure, functions, and evolution of our emotional selves are what aid in the processing in the brain region. The interplay of the brain’s neocortical regions with the limbic system is the common center that generates our perception of the world around us and how we perceive sensory inputs. The way this common center is capable of perceiving our functions plays a key role in how we process consciousness, reasoning, language, and information. This encoding allows us to carry out our executive functions. For example, a year ago another group of us wrote a blog about how the frontal cortex areas try to read the limbic system’s input to get that value input.
For us here, the common center starts with who you are – yourself. Through evolution and some reflection time, we develop ourselves through our cognitive selves. The way that we live our lives, especially as college students, is by being able to encode our development throughout time. What aids us in our understanding of our world is the common center and through it we think that we self-discover who we are within ourselves. As individuals, the attainment of self-discovery allows us to enter into our own development of self-identity.
As discussed in the following paragraphs, the discovery of the philosophical self can be through an emic and an etic view. We can interlink our own specific experiences and memories, which helps us understand who we are at the core of our being. According to this thinking, we interpret the world by analyzing ourselves through the emotions, and here we find the emic-etic (inside vs outside) distinction to be useful. The idea here is that the only way to understand oneself is by looking at who you are on the inside (the brain’s representation of who you are), and that is how you can present yourself on the outside to the world (how others and the world react to you). One could argue that the self is broken down into individual pieces, which helps you develop an understanding of your emotions and cognition. This helps you form your external environment by interpreting your internal stimuli.
To get a bit philosophical here, the many parts that the self might be broken down into the mind, body, and our emotional selves. Each part is its own, but they all incorporate specific aspects of themselves within each other. Within each part of the self, one can go beyond the common center. By going beyond the center, we can then piece together what enables our cognition; this is formed through the existence of multiple aspects of the conceptual self, which allows us to build a foundation for our conceptual knowledge. By doing this, our cognition is analyzed to help us validate this knowledge through the amygdala and internalize our emotions to exhibit our conceptual selves. In some ways, this is the ultimate reflection of who you are as a person.
Further, the interplay between the common center and oneself is responsible for validating our cognition. We can do this by inquiring about emotions to determine our cortical neural networks. By enabling our limbic functions, we can provide pathways to our cognition to help identify our conceptual selves. The conceptual self can be understood by developing the connections we form between our emotions and cognition. We develop our cognition by internally breaking down our emotions to determine our thought processes. Determining our thought processes aids in our understanding of the conceptual knowledge we obtain through the common center.
The idea of who we are and defining our being is universal. This thinking goes to the idea of what makes us an individual, and how we must look at our internal selves to determine our external state (again emic vs etic). There is no definition of self if one cannot take their integrative self and interpret beyond what we know to be our perspective. We seem to be built to develop a coherent narrative about who we are. When we are vulnerable, we can dissect every part of ourselves. By doing this dissection, we can restructure who we are at our core by using the common center. The idea of what we used to know as familiar becomes the unknown, and within exploring the unknown is where you find yourself. Maybe this is the definition of growth.
