I had a lot of trouble deciding what I would do my first real post on, but in the end it seemed natural to start with (what was supposed to be) a brief description of my views on emotions. This seemed like a good starting point not only because this is a blog about the struggle between emotions and the idea of evolution and I summarized evolution previously but because for me it is a bit of a beginning.
I didn’t know I wanted to be a biologist until I was forced to take a biology course in my first year of university. I have a vague recollection of being in elementary school and being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. After some though, I concluded that while I didn’t know what the job was, what I really wanted to be was someone who worked with math and animals. Despite how perfectly that describes what I do now, as the school system began to teach me biology I quickly realized that it was a foolish goal since to work with animals you studied biology and clearly all biology is is memorizing what things are called, something I am terrible at. This sets the stage for a brief moment in my grade 10 humanities class by clarifying that at that time I wasn’t interested in (more like actively scorning) biology, much less evolution. We had been practicing rapid writing for some end of year exam by getting a topic and writing a few paragraphs on it in 20 minutes, after which some people would read theirs. In the class of interest, the topic was “what is fear” and as far as I could tell the class response was unanimous, with writings focused on one idea: fear is what limits you, it’s what you must conquer. Now maybe it was simply a product of the stories we are told growing up, maybe it is how we naturally view our emotions or maybe a being a small nerdy kid growing up had given me a more timid viewpoint than everyone else who presented but my view was very different. To me, the natural response was that fear is your guardian angel, that which protects you and guides you from harm. Every time I think back to that memory I am always surprised by how telling it is about where I would end up and how I would think about the world. It is that functional way perspective on emotions, which hopefully differs at least in some way from your own so as to be interesting, that I will begin explore in this post.
So what are emotions? First, avoiding looking up a definition my inclination is that they are a psychological state which motivates an action to be taken. This seems too broad though as is includes clearly physiological states such as pain, hunger, exhaustion, and stress when what I am interested in more abstract states like fear, love, and happiness (update: apparently the former are called homeostatic emotions while the latter are classic emotions). Would it then be appropriate to say “a purely psychological state” to discriminate between the two? To me, the real issue is temporal: the former group of states are psychological interpretations of the immediate physical condition while I will argue that the latter are predictions of future conditions. This quality of prediction is what makes emotions interesting. Like the discussion in the last post about laws and theories the former is complete in and of itself while the precise influence of the latter is highly condition dependent: the Second Law of Thermodynamics always has the same effect regardless of conditions just as being tired always means you need rest while adaptation can be hindered by genetic drift (evolutionary changes due to random survival and/or reproduction) and trust can be overwhelmed by fear.
So what are emotions? First, avoiding looking up a definition my inclination is that they are a psychological state which motivates an action to be taken. This seems too broad though as is includes clearly physiological states such as pain, hunger, exhaustion, and stress when what I am interested in more abstract states like fear, love, and happiness (update: apparently the former are called homeostatic emotions while the latter are classic emotions). Would it then be appropriate to say “a purely psychological state” to discriminate between the two? To me, the real issue is temporal: the former group of states are psychological interpretations of the immediate physical condition while I will argue that the latter are predictions of future conditions. This quality of prediction is what makes emotions interesting. Like the discussion in the last post about laws and theories the former is complete in and of itself while the precise influence of the latter is highly condition dependent: the Second Law of Thermodynamics always has the same effect regardless of conditions just as being tired always means you need rest while adaptation can be hindered by genetic drift (evolutionary changes due to random survival and/or reproduction) and trust can be overwhelmed by fear.
Here is my functional view of emotions: they convert a large amount of cost-benefit information into a few units of emotional currency such that your conscious mind can quickly integrate and respond to it. In the rest of this post I will strive to explain what I mean by or the importance of each part of this description.
