ROC the V: Voting on Valence
Posted: May 30, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: affect, consciousness, economics, systems, values 1 CommentSequel to Do Nematodes Feel?
Write the skit where Nico Frijda + Lisa Feldman Barrett + James Russell judge Antonio Damasio/Karl Friston‘s valence theory of Risk/Opportunity/Cost(Value) as a rock battle.
ChatGPT Prompt
A Battle of the Bands at the Annual Congress of the Society for Affective Science
Scene 1: Opening
MC:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first annual…
ROC THE V!
Tonight’s question:
Read the rest of this entry »Is valence merely positive versus negative…
Or is it secretly a three-dimensional vector of Risk, Opportunity, and Cost?
Narrative Self Café v13: Making a HASH of Hierarchical Feelings
Posted: February 9, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: affect, emotions, identity, purpose, systems, values 3 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as BASH (Bottlenecked Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Write aTom Stoppard–style dialogue where Karl Friston, Evan Thompson, Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, and surprise guest Nico Frijda start out fighting; then self-similarly realize “global integration” of affect implies partial integration (“premotion“) is possible, which in turn requires a post-BASH architecture.
ChatGPT Prompt
Setting: The same café. The chalkboard still reads BASH. Someone has added, underneath:
“Yes, but who is feeling it?”
Act I: The Incommensurability Problem
1. Opening: Immediate Disagreement
Panksepp (stabbing the chalkboard):
You’ve drawn a plumbing diagram and called it emotion.
Friston (calmly):
I’ve drawn the conditions under which emotion must arise.
Solms:
Karl, with respect, feelings are not what must arise. They are what matter.
Thompson:
Gentlemen, perhaps we should notice we’re already enacting the phenomenon. This room is thick with affect and no one has yet computed a boundary condition.
Radical Centrism 