The Mind of the Hungry Agent: Hunger, Affect and Appetite
- PDF / 576,665 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 166 Views
The Mind of the Hungry Agent: Hunger, Affect and Appetite Michele Davide Ombrato1 · Edgar Phillips2 Accepted: 29 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The aim of this paper is to provide an account of how hunger motivates us to seek food and eat. It seems that the way that it feels to be hungry must play some role in it fulfilling this function. We propose that hunger is best viewed as a complex state involving both affective (viz., hedonic) and somatic constituents, as well as, crucially, changes in the way in which the hungry agent’s attention is deployed. We argue that in order to capture the distinctive way in which hunger motivates we need to articulate the relations amongst such components. The resulting account explains how hunger as an aversive affective reaction to a state of need motivates us specifically to eat and not to just to rid ourselves of the unpleasant sensations associated to it. We suggest, however, that there is more than this to the overall affective experience of the hungry agent, because hunger ordinarily facilitates the elicitation of other, positive affective reactions such as interest and appetite, and recruits them to further its function. Keywords Hunger · Appetite · Affective reactions · Attention · Emotions · Motivation
1 Introduction The primary biological function of hunger is to motivate us to seek food and eat. A tempting first pass at a philosophical account of hunger might then be to say that being hungry is simply a matter of being disposed to engage in food-seeking and -consuming behaviour. This suggestion, however, succumbs to the slightest scrutiny. Even though being hungry clearly does involve being disposed to eat, it seems that we may be so disposed without being hungry: we may want to eat, for instance, in order to gain weight, or because the food before us is especially appealing, or out of boredom. The authors are listed alphabetically and equally contributed to this paper. Sections 3 and 4 draw on ideas from chapter 2 of Michele Ombrato’s doctoral dissertation. For comments and discussion, we thank Fabrice Teroni, Matthew Soteriou and two anonymous reviewers. Michele Ombrato gratefully acknowledges support of his work by a grant from the Schmidheiny Foundation. * Michele Davide Ombrato [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Campus Biotech, 9 Chemin des Mines, Geneva, Switzerland
Thumos Research Group, Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Campus Biotech, 9 Chemin des Mines, Geneva, Switzerland
2
What is it, then, that is distinctive about being hungry and about being motivated by hunger to eat? A natural thought is that hunger feels a certain way that other states of being motivated to eat do not, and that hunger motivates us to eat in virtue of its feeling that way. If this thought is correct, accounting for how hunger motivates requires accounting for its experiential dimension, and the connection between the hungry agent’s experience and her food-seeking and -consuming beh
Data Loading...
