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.
A world of cost-benefit information
Why are we attracted to beautiful things? More appropriately, beautiful things are things we are attracted to, so what determines what is beautiful? After some googling, here are some things I found generally deemed to be beautiful: flowers, rivers and waterfalls, a variety of birds and mammals, facial symmetry, clean skin, a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio in females, vivid colours, smiles, and acts of kindness (and in some cases acts of religiosity though I will get to that in a future post). There is a lot of variety here: we have aspects or nature, both biotic and abiotic, human physical appearance, a human interaction, and a display of human personality as well as a general attraction to vivid colours. The link? These are all things that indicate good conditions to survive, grow, and/or reproduce. Flowing water is one of the primary requirements for any human settlement. Flowers, vivid colours (think fruits, which are colourful precisely so animals will eat them), and wildlife with similar physiological requirements to humans are all very good signs that a location has the requisite climate, food and shelter for a human population. All of the physical human attributes listed are thought to represent good genes, health, and fertility while smiles and acts of kindness suggest a pro-social environment. We could do the same thing for ugly things: a barren landscape, signs of illness, human waste, frowns and glares, all of which suggest contagions or unfavourable conditions.
The world we observe around us is full of information about future conditions in a given area: should we expect to find food or a good job or are many people similar to us poor and hungry, should we expect to find a good mate or are we more likely to get mugged, if I confront an aggressor are they likely to run or fight? The challenge is integrating all of this information to calculate the costs and the benefits, the risks and the rewards.
The currency of emotions
Emotions are a lot like money, with each base emotion (see below) representing a different currency. Emotions take very different things and compare them on a common scale. The value of these things changes based on past experience and multiples of the same thing show diminishing returns (2 monsters are scarier than, but not twice as scary as, 1 monster). Finally, it is easy to compare between currencies but only when a conversion coefficient has already been set based on a large amount of information.
Before going forward, I figured I should at least check out what the behavioural psychologists have come up with in emotions research. Conveniently, a lot of effort has gone into grouping emotions in a systematic way. Unfortunately, there are many definitions and classifications of emotions and, while to be fair to myself it was at the top of the Wikipedia page, I of course latched onto those of an evolutionary minded psychologist, Plutchik. Plutchik posited four pairs of basic emotions which, like the primary colours, combine to produce all the other emotions. These eight primary emotions are listed in the table below. As I worried going with the evolutionary psychologist was a biased choice, I did a very brief review of the modern literature on “basic emotions” (what I will call primary emotions; emotions which combine to produce all of the other emotions) and they still seem to be in favour, now supported by neurological evidence. Other primary emotion models have a similar list, usually differing only by adding in a shame like emotion or removing anticipation but I strongly prefer Plutchik’s paired organization.
Before going forward, I figured I should at least check out what the behavioural psychologists have come up with in emotions research. Conveniently, a lot of effort has gone into grouping emotions in a systematic way. Unfortunately, there are many definitions and classifications of emotions and, while to be fair to myself it was at the top of the Wikipedia page, I of course latched onto those of an evolutionary minded psychologist, Plutchik. Plutchik posited four pairs of basic emotions which, like the primary colours, combine to produce all the other emotions. These eight primary emotions are listed in the table below. As I worried going with the evolutionary psychologist was a biased choice, I did a very brief review of the modern literature on “basic emotions” (what I will call primary emotions; emotions which combine to produce all of the other emotions) and they still seem to be in favour, now supported by neurological evidence. Other primary emotion models have a similar list, usually differing only by adding in a shame like emotion or removing anticipation but I strongly prefer Plutchik’s paired organization.
Plutchik's wheel of emotions | Interpretation (my view) | |
Joy | Sadness | Do/don't repeat behaviour in the future |
Trust | Disgust | seek out/avoid object |
Fear | Anger | Positive/negative (benefiting/harming the target) interaction |
Surprise | Anticipation | recalculate/wait for new data |
Plutchik apparently assigned an adaptive meaning to each basic emotion but as I can’t find his we will use my own. As mentioned in my first definition of emotions, emotions are motivational states. That is to say, emotions tend you towards taking a particular action. Since these are the primary emotions they should cover all the basic actions of data collection and response without overlap. In my next post (2b) I will explain how the interpretations listed above fill out a decision tree as to how to respond to observed objects or actions in such a way as to maximize good and minimize harm to one’s self.
Think quick!
Why aren’t we all like Vulcans from Star Trek, purged of emotions and relying only on logical thought? Well, one of the main points I am trying to make it that emotions actually embody logical though. If that is the case, though, (a) why bother with emotions at all if we can just reason through each decision and (b) why do we often discriminate between being rational and emotional? I believe the answer to (a) is fairly straight forward while the answer to (b) has multiple causes. So, let’s start with (a) and leave (b) for a separate post or your own consideration considering the length of this post already.
Emotions are all interpreted and balanced through conscious thought, which is a logic processing center, and the mechanisms of the emotions are logic base (see post 2b). The question then is why split the analysis up into two steps when the processing rules are the same for both? The answer comes from computer science, which makes sense since computer scientists study how to optimize logic based data processing. Black box programming means that sections of the code are isolated as “functions”. Functions “do” a certain thing, taking a certain type of input and converting it into a certain type of output. For example, a mathematical sum function will take in a bunch of numbers and give out a single number which is the numerical sum of all the input numbers. The advantage of functions is that they can they are optimized to do a very specific thing. That specificity allows them to be very efficient; just as with vehicles, there is a general trade-off between speed and manoeuvrability in most things there is a trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. The black-box approach makes sense for emotions both because the processes they represent are used extremely often and they need to be done very efficiently. As I said above, there is a lot of cost-benefit information in this world and, while massive, we only have limited brain power. As such, the more efficiently we process each object or action the more we will be able to consider or the more completely we will be able to consider them. Also, as is easy to imagine with emotions like fear, there are cases were observing and reacting quickly will make the difference between life and death. Surprise and anxiety help make the whole process more efficient but, particularly with evolution, every little bit helps.
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