If Physics Textbooks Had A Chapter On Emotions

This is going to be one of those unapologetically pseudoscientific blog posts where I put forward a theory that I already know probably isn’t true, but has just enough explanation power to warrant a book by Deepak Chopra.

I was thinking about how concepts of energy never quite clicked with me. If you drop a ball to the ground, supposedly there is a transition from gravitational potential energy (which would have built up as you rose the ball before dropping it) to kinetic energy as the ball falls and increases in speed. It’s talked about as if the ball magically contains this essence of gravitational potential energy inside it, and the concept of kinetic energy itself is tricky to understand; what does it mean for a ball to have energy by virtue of the fact that it’s moving?

Then I came across Karl Friston’s principle of free energy in the context of organisms, which describes what motivates every living thing to do what it does. Friston’s theory is that the ‘free energy’ of an organism is the difference between its expectations and its sensory input and that every organism spends all its time trying to reduce free energy. I spent some time thinking about whether that makes any sense (obvious counterargument: don’t organisms just run on reward systems that revolve around staying alive and spreading genes? What does that have to do with closing the gap between expectations and sensory input) and after a while I convinced myself that indeed you can reduce everything down to just expectations minus sensory input (which I’ll cover in another post) but while I was working it out in my head, it bothered me that a concept that could have been expressed in a fairly simple way was made obscure by the use of the word ‘energy’ to describe this expression of ‘expectations minus sensory input’. How is using the term ‘free energy’ that useful to anybody trying to understand this thing? Why smuggle the lingo of physics into descriptions of organisms’ behaviour, unless your goal was merely to legitimise your theory through association with a harder science than biology? Why pick some expression (in this case ‘expectations minus sensory input’) and then say ‘because this changes as the system changes, we’ll call it energy’?

But then it hit me: that’s exactly what we do whenever we use the word energy in any science. Energy is usually defined circularly with Work. If I push a box from one side of a room to another, I’ve consumed some of my energy in doing the work of pushing that box across the room. If I had only pushed it halfway, I would have required half the energy. Energy in this case is just the word we use to describe some easily expressed quantity that changes identically to the work done (work being a description of the change in a system, in this case the box having moved say 4 metres). As scientists, we rock up to a system, observe it changing, and then express the changes occurring in terms of energy exchanges that produce work, but the energy isn’t really real, it’s just a conceptual tool we use to enable our cause-and-effect brains to make sense of a system that just ‘is’ changing. We pick ‘energy’ as our cause and ‘work’ as the effect.

Friston‘s theory is something like ‘hey, whenever something unexpected happens to this worm like being exposed to undesirable heat, the gulf between expectation and sensory input increases, and then we see the worm start moving away from the source of heat, thus reducing the size of the gulf and using free energy. Once the worm has moved far enough away, the gulf is basically closed and now the worm has less free energy, so it’s not moving nearly as much’.

The exact same analogy can be made to picking up a ball off the ground (increasing its potential gravitational energy) and dropping it again where it now naturally falls to the ground. Given that every time you let go the ball ‘chooses’ to use its free energy to drop towards the ground, there must be something about balls where they have a fundamental desire to reduce that free energy, just like how organisms have a fundamental desire to reduce their free energy. But of course there’s no underlying desire or choice being made here in either case: it’s just things doing what they do. You could say well what if the ball didn’t fall when you let go, and the obvious response would be ‘For that to be the case, the object would need to not have any mass, which means it wouldn’t be a ball, it would be a beam of light or some other object not holding the trait of ‘having mass’’. Likewise you could say well what if living organisms didn’t try to reduce the difference between expectation and sensory input and the analogous obvious response is ‘you show me a person getting stabbed in the chest without any reaction, and I’ll show you somebody who’s already dead’. Dead people do surprisingly little to reduce the gulf between expectations and sensory inputs.

All the examples of energy that we have in physics work because we’ve identified some quality (like having mass) that is intrinsically a part of an object’s definition, and then observed how that quality dictates the object’s behaviour in the system, and then said ‘hey see how that thing is doing something? There must have been energy there that caused that to happen’.

Which begs the question of whether the Law of Conservation of Energy is true empirically or by axiom. If we discovered that a system could somehow output more energy than it received in the first place, wouldn’t we just define some new kind of energy to account for the difference and then continue going about our daily lives? Granted, the extent of my exposure to physics is doing it in year 12, and best believe I got the grades through memorisation of formulas moreso than understanding anything about the underlying concepts.

And so finally I’ve gotten to the point of this blog post: what if there was a law of conservation of emotional energy? Putting Friston’s free energy idea to the side, what if all the emotions that humans exhibit can be considered to be energy, and our emotional energy can be increased by the outside world (like how rainy weather makes me melancholy) and decreased through our actions (like how exercise makes you happy). This isn’t particularly interesting in and of itself because everybody already knows that exercise makes you happy. But what interests me is how the human brain has evolved to keep note of the larger system (i.e. society) and ensure that it’s doing its part to abide by the law of conservation.

One example: Alice is having a really crappy day and her friend Bob realises this and asks what’s going on. Alice says she’s sad because her cat died, and Bob recognises this pain, feels the pain himself because he is an empathetic person, and gives Alice a hug saying ‘you poor thing’. Alice can tell by the look on Bob’s face that Bob really is sharing in the pain, and Alice instantly feels better.

What just happened? Drawing borders around this closed system we’ve got two organisms, one of which contains 100 units of sadness energy, and at the end of the interaction we have two organisms, both containing 50 units each. ENERGY CONSERVED! Bob goes about his day feeling a little bit less fantastic given his friend’s hardship is weighing heavily on his heart, and Alice feels a little lighter knowing that somebody else is sharing the pain.

The way I see it, there is literally a transaction of emotional energy taking place here. Even though the emotions themselves aren’t being physically transferred, like the teleporters in star trek destroying molecules in A and creating them at B, it may as well be a physical transfer. So long as Alice and Bob can infer from eachother’s expressions how much emotional energy there is between them, they can unconsciously engage in lossless exchanges of that energy.

What if Alice’s personality was a little bit different? Bob asks what’s up and Alice, convinced that nobody could possibly understand the pain she’s feeling, says ‘go away you could not possibly understand the pain I’m feeling’. Bob, a little bit disgruntled, goes about his day as Alice continues holding all the pain to herself. We’ve still conserved the sadness energy, except this time the snapshot is the same before and after the interaction. Why wouldn’t Alice want to give herself a break and let somebody else share the pain with her? Because she genuinely believes that any attempt another person makes to replicate her pain in their own mind will fail, meaning it’s actually not possible for her to dissipate the sadness to anybody else. For somebody else to attempt to empathise with her would be to change the total amount of emotional energy in the system, because the flavour of sadness that an outsider might generate wouldn’t match the flavour of Alice’s sadness. It would be like trying to beam captain Kirk onto a planet, only to realise the captain Kirk that shows up on the planet has a different skin colour.

Emotions evolved for a reason and an individual feeling something like frustration can be very useful because it can spur them to change whatever frustrates them. But it seems like there’s no real requirement for the emotion to be felt only by the person it originates from. If a person is feeling frustrated at Trump being elected, and then they communicate that to somebody else, and then that person feels frustrated, the first person is now permitted to feel less frustration because many hands make light work and less action is required by any individual when a group’s motives are aligned.

Now I’m not saying there is a physical law of conservation of emotional energy, simply that there are evolutionary advantages to ensuring that in interactions between humans, the emotional energy is exchanged without any magical loss or creation of emotion. There’s still ways that you can get two people riled up about something, but what that usually looks like is: Alice on 100 frustration points says says to Bob ‘Trump said X’ and shares her frustration over it, putting them both at 50 points (halfway between 0 and 100), and then later on Bob finds out that Trump said Y, bumping him up to 70 points, and then Bob comes back to Alice later and says ‘I just heard that Trump did Y’ and in sharing the frustration, now they’re both at 60 points (halfway between 50 and 70). So although the total emotional energy in the system is increasing, the only net increases come from direct responses to external stimuli. In any actual exchange between Alice and Bob, the energy is conserved.

What about when deceit is involved? If I know that everybody else is unconsciously adjusting their emotions to keep the emotional system balanced, could I use that to my advantage? I’m reminded of a psychopathic kid from a documentary who acted really sad, got his mum to give him a hug, and then mid-hug gave a big grin and winked at the camera. Psychopaths are truly the alchemists of emotion: they know how to create something from nothing. The kid had no sadness to share, and yet in trying to approximate her son’s sadness through empathy, the mother generated some sadness for herself, assuming a balanced transaction was taking place, and unknowingly increased the total sadness in the system.

Luckily, humans have evolved correction mechanisms for when we find out we were way off in our original approximations of another person’s emotions. If somebody is deeply in love, but then finds out all the other person wanted was sex, they take those romantic emotions they assumed their love interest was sharing with them, and recognising the emotions to have been added to the system in error, take an emotional nosedive to return the system to equilibrium, becoming as depressed as they were previously happy.

Perhaps the reason we evolved to steer clear of liars and psychopaths is because you simply can’t rely on their signals about what the emotional landscape is, and every time you find yourself generating the wrong emotions internally as a response to the liar’s misleading depiction of the external world, you always pay for it in some way.

I suppose you could consider another person’s emotions to be both a part of the outside world, and also a reliable proxy for what else is in the outside world. If somebody is excited, you probably also have something to be excited about. Given that emotions are derived from the outside world, and emotions encode how a person should act to best interface with the outside world, maybe these biological strategies of emotional exchange are just efficient means of knowing how to act. If a caveman runs back to your cave looking really frightened, it’s in your best interest to be frightened as well (which has perks like increasing blood circulation and burning energy for your muscles to use). You didn’t even need to know that the caveman was in fact running from a tiger for you to be emotionally and therefore physically prepared to run away from a tiger in the next five seconds. Given the physical cost of an adrenaline rush, the incoming caveman will no doubt be a little less terrified when he sees the response from the other cavemen, who are now going to be distributing the load of dealing with the tiger.

But it seems like there’s more and more formats of interaction that seem to disturb the equilibrium that we’re all trying to create within ourselves. If you find out that some high profile figure did something a little bit scandalous, either via the internet or seven news, you’re not exposed to all the other people responding the same way that you are, so you’re not decreasing your outrage levels to keep things in equilibrium. In fact, most seven news reports are framed to convince you that nobody is paying attention to the scandal and that therefore you should feel especially outraged given that there are so few people to share the outrage with. When you have a massive number of people all feeling that they are part of a tiny minority of outraged people, you get mob behaviour and really bad things happen.

So it’s possible for the system to lose control and for outrage to be overinflated like a stock market bubble. And just like in the stock market all bubbles have to pop at some point. Did I just turn this blog post into another rant about outrage culture? Maybe, but it fits nicely into the theory so I’ll allow it.

There’s definitely places where the theory of conservation of emotional energy kinda falls through: how come when a comedian tells a joke, an entire crowd of people can laugh, and it doesn’t seem like an individual would be less likely to laugh given how many other people are laughing. In fact laughter is well known to be contagious. Although now that I think about it, the laughter at a comedy show is usually fairly short-lived, and comes in waves. I remember several times in highschool where a friend and I would come up with a joke and would be asked to leave the class after we were unable to stop laughing, and it would require us both splitting up and going on soul-searching walks before we could stop laughing, calm down, and return to class. I wonder if the fact that you know this hilarious thing is only shared with one other person means you experience it that much stronger? If the teacher says ‘would you like to share what’s funny with the rest of the class?’ and then you do, it suddenly becomes a lot less funny. So maybe this is actually evidence for my theory rather than against.

But there are other counterexamples: is the fear of the cavemen really split equally among the other cavemen before the tiger shows up and they start generating fear from the direct exposure to the threat? Hard to say. Either way, this seems like a good enough theory to help shape how I think about emotional interactions from now on. And like a true living organism, until I start seeing lots of other people thinking the same way, I’m gonna be thinking it hard.