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Grief as self-model updating

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Abstract

Philosophical discussion tends to converge on the view that narratives are at the center of the emotion of grief. In this article, I expand on this kind of view. On the one hand, I argue that key strands of phenomenological and neuroscientific studies suggest that grief consists in a complex emotional process of disconfirmation-and-updating of the narrative self-model. By heuristically drawing on an analogy between binocular rivalry and grief, I show that certain salient aspects of the phenomenology of grief, such as self-alienation and ambiguity, are straightforwardly reflected by this account. On the other hand, I argue that this hierarchical approach has the resources to: (i) show that both narratable and unnarratable experiences of personal loss are both instances of grief; and (ii) differentiate between narratable and unnarratable experiences of grief, without compromising the view that self-constituting narratives are at the center of the phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. The comments of the anonymous reviewers heavily improved this article. I am very thankful for their contribution to this work.

  2. The salience network is also key to self-representation; more precisely, to bodily self-representation (Seth, 2013). The involvement of the salience network during grief is to be expected, considering that grief is a bodily felt affective process. The salience network figures prominently in available studies on grief (see, e.g., Freed et al., 2009; Gündel et al., 2003; Joa & Newberg, 2023; Kersting et al., 2009; O’Connor et al., 2008).

  3. For ease of exposition, I use ‘model’ and ‘hypothesis’ interchangeably.

  4. If this PP account is on track, self-disruption amounts to disconfirmation of the hypotheses that form the self-model. The self-model is disconfirmed when its expectations fail to predict highly precision-weighted aspects of the social space. This demands revising and updating the parameters of the self-model (more on this below).

  5. Self-model rivalry can also account for the sense of intrusion of heteronomy (Huges, 2023), together with the typical withdrawal of heteronomy that the self-alienation of grief brings (Køster, 2023). Both can be taken to be two sides of the same process of long-timescale self-model rivalry. During self-model rivalry, both (or more) self-models and their expectations alternate in taking control precedence over the other model. The old model dominates, bringing the sense of intrusion; while the model under formation brings alterity withdrawal.

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    J. M. Araya

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Araya, J.M. Grief as self-model updating. Phenom Cogn Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09945-8

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