[HN Gopher] Anger and fear: ten years of research in the lab and...
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Anger and fear: ten years of research in the lab and field
Author : swibbler
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-02-28 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| aluminum96 wrote:
| > Emotions are coordination systems designed to refocus your
| entire cognitive architecture towards a specific task
|
| This is a really powerful way of looking at emotion. Of course
| emotion serves an evolutionary purpose, but it's such a basic
| part of our lived experience that it's hard to view it critically
| like that.
| roughly wrote:
| There have been studies that have associated emotion with
| decision making - people who, for some reason, lack an
| emotional state, find it basically impossible to make a
| decision.
| meken wrote:
| That's interesting. Any chance you remember which study it
| was?
| roughly wrote:
| I wish I did. I'll take a look later and see if I can dig
| them up.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's from a book by Antonio Damasio called Descartes'
| Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
|
| The first known case is Phineas Gage, but I'm pretty sure
| Damasio documented more contemporary patients he had
| studied live (been a while since I read this book).
| epgui wrote:
| Phineas Gage is a terrible example: he suffered
| incredible frontal lobe injuries. Neuroanatomy is much
| more complex than "part A performs job X", but the
| frontal lobe is particularly important in executive
| functions. More caudal structures are more closely
| associated with emotion, in general.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| No
|
| Emotions do not serve any purpose. It's a abstract concept
| describing certain psychogical process in human that is not
| characterized by so-called rational thinking.
|
| Most non artificial things are not serving any purpose, they
| are coincidents filtered through natural selection.
|
| Most artificial things serve some purpose of its makers.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| emotions give reasons to live and reasons to end life.
|
| there is no purpose without emotions.
| epgui wrote:
| I understand why you're being downvoted, but I do think there
| is value in your comment. It's perhaps not the most artful
| articulation of ideas, but it points to serious (afaik)
| philosophical questions. Whether emotions have a purpose is
| both a semantic and a philosophical question.
|
| I would point anyone who thinks this comment is unreasonable
| to discussions about teleology and science:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology#Science
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| They may certainly be counterproductive at times, but if they
| truly served no purpose it seems unlikely we'd have them?
| Also there's at least mixed evidence for the existence of
| similar states in animals[1].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_in_animals
| epgui wrote:
| An important part of the question is semantic: what do we
| mean when we say that something has a "purpose"?
|
| This is very much a live (and possibly a dead-end) question
| in evolutionary biology:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, that feels a bit like the difference between
| verifiability and falsifiability to me. It doesn't seem
| like adaptations need to be goal-driven, but if they were
| flat-out bad/destructive/unhelpful to the species, I
| would tend to expect them to fade over time? Pointing to
| any specific trait and saying it's useless, though, opens
| you up to arguments that you just haven't found the use
| yet.
| epgui wrote:
| There are a lot of accidents of evolution that don't have
| a "purpose". The shape/trajectory of the vagus nerve, the
| appendix, the human tailbone, etc...
|
| This goes to the root of what we mean when we say
| "purpose". Are we saying the trait is "helping" to
| "achieve" some "goal", or are we really just saying that
| there's some relationship between the trait and the
| individual's environment, or that the existence of the
| trait can be explained by properties of the environment?
| If the latter, then are we stretching the meaning of the
| word "purpose"?
|
| It's a bit like how some people say "everything happens
| for a reason" (in this sense reason points to a purpose),
| whereas I'm more of the mind that no, most things more or
| less happen for no particular reason (ie.: serving no
| particular purpose).
|
| I would argue that it's not exactly clear whether you
| could even say that evolution itself has a "purpose".
| It's just something that happens, given a bunch of
| organisms competing for resources.
| Bayart wrote:
| From a purely rational point of view, isn't it safer to
| assume that by default every element of our species is
| purposeful unless proven otherwise ?
| epgui wrote:
| No more "purposeful" than a bag of chemicals, or molecules
| in a gas, bumping into each other at random, really.
| yodon wrote:
| > BUT: Your psychology was designed for a world of small-group
| aggression. Not a world of nukes. This mismatch means that your
| intuitions are not always optimal guides. Balancing emotions
| for group-aggression with cold reason is key over the next days
| and, possibly, years.
| throwaway73838 wrote:
| I think it's problematic to reduce human emotions and the human
| experience to mere cause/effect. Is the Mona Lisa paint on a
| canvas, a representation of one man's artistic expression? Or
| is it a window into the soul of humanity? It can be dangerous
| to overly simplify consciousness.
| shaolinspirit wrote:
| human psyche rhymes in time
| austincheney wrote:
| As an interesting allude performing the following substitutions
| and the content reads exactly the same with exactly the same
| result, because it isn't about war but behavior.
| "war" => "writing JavaScript" "cold war" => "age of
| software" locations => JavaScript framework names
| epgui wrote:
| > Risks associated with war will begin to look smaller. This is
| not a "cognitive bias" but a design feature of a mind shifting
| from navigating a prestige-based world to a dominance-based
| world.
|
| That's absolutely a cognitive bias, and that's exactly the manner
| in which cognitive biases emerge over time. It being a "normal"
| biological or social adaptation does not mean it is not a
| cognitive bias: all cognitive biases are "normal" adaptations
| (although they are often maladaptive).
|
| > Your psychology was designed for a world of small-group
| aggression. Not a world of nukes. This mismatch means that your
| intuitions are not always optimal guides. Balancing emotions for
| group-aggression with cold reason is key over the next days and,
| possibly, years.
|
| Case in point.
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