Posted by Estella on May 18, 2006, at 3:13:49
In reply to Re: opinion survey, posted by Racer on May 17, 2006, at 22:04:46
> 1. Do animals have emotions? That's one of those questions that really shouldn't be difficult: yes, animals have emotions.
yeah. i think so too.
> What's that? You're asking me to back that up with evidence? OK, I can prove that ONE animal has emotions -- humans. Therefore, someone has to prove to me that other animals DON'T have emotions before I believe it.> So, I say, turn the question around: if humans have emotions, why should we believe that emotions come from our increased reasoning powers? Emotions are hardly the epitome of reason, are they?
cognitive theorists say cognition is a necessary cause of emotion.
animals (and infants) lack the cognitive sophistication necessary for emotion
therefore animals (and infants) lack emotional responses.how do they account for the behaviours that we typically take to be evidence for their having emotion?
they say the responses are so basic they are kind of like proto-emotions. they aren't emotions proper but if you add cognitive sophistication to proto-emotions you might just get yourself an emotion.
why do they go that way?
because emotions are typically evoked in theories of
1) ethics
2) rationality
thus people want there to be norms around when it is and is not appropriate to have an emotional response. body changes, phenomenology, sensations aren't typically thought to be rationally evaluable whereas we want emotions to be rationally evaluable (for our theories of rationality and ethics). cognitions are rationally evaluable therefore emotions must surely be cognitions.i don't like it...
i think the theory is getting people into a muddle...emotions have traditionally be contrasted with reason. recently there has been a move towards considering that emotions actually serve a useful function and there is a kind of rationality that can be exhibited by emotions (when all goes well) like there is a kind of rationality that can be exhibited by beliefs (when all goes well).
Damasio writes about people who have lost the capacity for emotional response (but their rationality is okay) by head injury. they perform well on standard IQ tests. inductive and deductive reasoning tasks. yet they go around making bad decisions...
Theorists have also started writing about game theory... And about how people do badly at game theory (they will make bad decisions and don't perform optimally)
Their decisions seem to be based on emotions...
Their decisions seem to be based on norms of cooperation e.g. punishing cheaters and deflectors.
Rational in a sense...
> 2. What's most important about emotions? Personally, I tend to see things in terms of the physical response, probably since I don't recognize my own emotions. So, I'd say that the physical response happens, and the emotion follows from it. So, I'd vote physical, although I repeat that that opinion is based in my own psychopathology.
Do you know that you are in an emotional state but you can't distinguish which one so you look to your body for cues or do you need to look to your body to distinguish whether you are in an emotional state or not?
> 3. Unconscious emotion? I don't know. Since I won't be graded on this, I'd repeat what someone else said in this thread: no, we may not recognize the emotion, and the thoughts which provoked it may be unconscious, but the emotion itself is not unconscious.Yeah. I think so too...
But there can be tricky issues. Pain is typically defined (in philosophy) as being essentially phenomenological.
But... If I have a headache I might be distracted from the phenomenology for a couple of minutes. During that time... Was I still in pain or not?Some people say yes
Others say no
Some people say you could have experienced it if you had attended to it and thus it counts as pain.I'm not sure what to say...
> How'd I do? Do I get an A? :-)Absolutely :-)
Thank you.
poster:Estella
thread:645293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060513/msgs/645399.html