Emotion

What is human life without emotion? Could the “dawn of humankind” even be imagined without emotion exerting its effects right there from the start? And across the millennia emotion has forever been at the heart of most matters. Human history has been shaped by emotion and reshaped by attitudes toward emotion; a powerful human force philosophers and theologians confront and reckon with again and again throughout history and in every culture.

So near and so familiar to us all and yet emotions present all sorts of philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific paradoxes. Many of the same mysteries elicited by the study of consciousness generally seem to re-emerge even after zooming our focus in on emotion. Are the neural signatures of an emotion the same as the experience of that emotion? Do feelings contribute to our evolutionary fitness or are they by-products, epiphenomena that somehow follow from some more fundamental form of adaptation? How can we ever know what it’s like to feel like a bat? Is that rat laughing at me?

Why do emotions seem to control us at times, control our thoughts and behavior, while at other times we apparently have control over them? Listening to music, sipping some tea, calling a close friend: all of these activities are a means to sculpt our state of mind. When do they work and why do they sometimes fail so miserably?

Do the emotions form a natural class? Cellos and oboes are both classified as instruments despite their obvious differences, and yet consider this: each can play the same melody. What features and what functions do the emotions share in common? This question is raised now especially as there is talk of incorporating empathy into artificial intelligence programming. Can sadness, anger, frustration, jealousy and joy be programmed? Should they be? Are they simply different component modules of general intelligence or do the emotions grow organically out of some other feature of experience that we don’t yet understand?