From a religious POV...... From a evolutionary POV...... From a chemical POV.......
Or just for the heck of it?
Discuss.
Posted by Reticulum (Member # 8776) on :
Emotions are the expression of our Brain's immediate posture with regard to the successful progression towards achieving our Dreams.
If it feels bad, stop, if it feels good, keep going.
Posted by jebus202 (Member # 2524) on :
So has everybody on Hatrack just stopped taking their pills? The crazies are swarming.
Posted by AchillesHeel (Member # 11736) on :
It is almost enough to make one consider reddit.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
or buying a water filter
Posted by RivalOfTheRose (Member # 11535) on :
I'm not crazy, I thought it would be an interesting discussion. Sorry.
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
From a religious stand point I believe emotions are part of our nature as God's children. He by nature has them, so we do as well.
I'm not sure what it would be like if you could strip emotions away.
But I feel like emotions are a means to communicate our desires. Largely they are a sort of language that operates outside our control in large part.
They also as provide a means for us to share memories on a deep level. It's cool to witness the same thing, but it's even better to experience it together emotionally. Though we don't necessarily feel the same emotion, we still share in that moment. That can be a very positive and binding experience.
I don't fully understand the interface that is our brain when it comes to emotions. Clearly, we can be made to feel a certain way by having our brains manipulated. But people can also spontaneously feel different emotions when given certain cues. It's very had to get a grip on, sufficeth me to say, while I do believe in a soul, I don't think our souls feel emotions and simply convey them to the body.
Rather the soul feels things, but the body also feels things, and those things interface together.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by RivalOfTheRose: I'm not crazy, I thought it would be an interesting discussion.
it would and will be, it's just that hatrack is going through a .. phase these days
Posted by Heisenberg (Member # 13004) on :
I think from an evolutionary standpoint, emotions serve as cues to the animal in question that a specific response is desirable.
Now, I definitely have some bias here. I much prefer logic and thinking things out as opposed to throwing stuff around or crying my eyes out. The latter doesn't really help much, and tends to make things worse. When it comes to rating how "advanced" each part of the human experience is, I put emotions much closer to primitive then I do rationality and logic.
Looking at it through a Darwinian lens, I have a hard time thinking of emotions that wouldn't, overall, provide an evolutionary advantage.
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
My (really amateurish and brief) evolutionary psychology view of emotions:
Happiness, contentment, and love serve to reinforce behaviors that promote survival.
Fear serves to help avoid threats to survival.
Anger and hatred can help to defeat threats to survival.
It gets much more complicated when you take empathy and group dynamics into account, of course. But empathy is the key to ensuring community success and preventing circumstances that threaten entire communities. There is tension between it and fear/anger. How they SHOULD balance out changes depending on the context. If your context is that someone is going to kill your tribe if your tribe doesn't kill them first, then it is appropriate that your empathy is mostly limited to people in the tribe. But later on when you have nuclear weapons you need to try to balance things differently.
Posted by Godric 2.0 (Member # 11443) on :
quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I'm not sure what it would be like if you could strip emotions away.
Radiolab did a really interesting show on Emotions. The segment about Eliot here takes a look at what happens when emotions get stripped away.
Fascinating stuff.
Posted by Darth_Mauve (Member # 4709) on :
Emotions are the important undigitizable human thing that separates us from the mass of android and replicant slaves that we all abuse and ignore until eventually they rise up and slay us all.