Where do feelings come from? I know that parts of the brain control emotion, but from an evolution point of view emotions don't seem to make a lot of sense. Wouldn't an absence of emotion better serve an evolutionary system?

Good question !!


I wonder why animals/mammals have feelings/emotions too ?

No, it wouldn't. Fear is a very powerful survival tool to us even today. Keeps us mostly out of danger, tells us when to get the hell out of there and to stop what we're doing. Lust is the intense feeling that our brain plays tricks with us to get us to mate so our genetic material will be spread on. Just a few of the easier examples of emotions.

You'd think so if you looked at evolution as a system of individuals. Individual humans just wouldn't survive when matched up to most of the other animals out there, but the same is true for many species, from ants to wolves to dolphins. Emotions like empathy evolved because a social mammal species would not survive without it, a lot of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom have similiar emotions.

what about destructive emotions like anger? or what about grief?

It seems to me that conditioned responses would be better at things like grouping, or lust, or even fear. "no need to think on it, just do it" sorta thing. Why muddy it up with emotion?

Anger has provided us with being able to survive through fighting I'd assume by fighting off thing that would kill us by fueling adrenaline into our bodies. If you've ever gotten so angry or gotten into a fight afterwards you'll feel like your entire body is rushing and tightened up sometimes so much it'll hurt.

This seems like a good link and explains in much more detail... Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions

Maybe for Vulcans . Speaking personally, I am unsure that I would bother to get out of bed in the morning on purely rational grounds. That can't be good.

Vulcans have very powerful emotions actually. They are able to deeply control them through years of training. They also express their emotions differently then humanity does. Spock's half brother is also an example of failing to follow the path of logic and embracing emotion. Their distant cousins the Romulans have quite potent emotions as well. They only seek to surpress their emotions to live by logic and reasoning. Which has served them pretty good.

Simply put, feelings are a chemical response in our brain to outside stimuli which evolution has instilled in us.

It's how we react to this stimulation that makes all the difference whether we live or die (or simply feel like crap).

It's only logical.

Actually, without emotion we wouldn't "feel" like anything, we would simply go about the business of surviving and propagating the species without all the tangles that emotion give us. I don't think ants, which to me are some of the most successful organisms in the world, feel like crap, i doubt they have emotions at all.

I think feelings come from the heart, wher The God spark resides.

Also no feelings might be good for technology, but bad for Love and acountability,. This is wher the grays messed up, but with a little human dna mixed in, they are on the mend.

Love Omnaka

Did you know that Russian scientists removed the head of a chimp and planted it on the body of another chimp. They transplanted its consciousness and emotions. The spark of God residing in the heart, if anywhere, is probably not right.

And how do they know it was not the consciousness , and emoyions of the Body of the other chimp. Not saying it's not true , can You post a link though?

Love Omnaka

Kratos provided a link which i read. One pasage neatly summarises the situation for me





This branch of psychology is saying that emotions are pure instinctive feelings, learned by continued exposure to different stimuli and the best reaction to each. It believes that we do not scan the environment and use our intellect to freely chose successful actions.

In my opinion they are partly right and partly wrong. They go on to analyse fear, as an example and say that we always react to fear in preprogrammed ways. However this does not make alowance for our intelligence and ability to make choices which overide those felings.

It is possible to learn, to first ignore, and then eliminate, the physical reactions of fear which danger brings to us. I know because i learned to do this as a child, but also every soldier must learn to do this before they can be effective in their role. And fear is one of the most powerful and basic emotions If we can overide this through an homunculi(or more simpply the application of rational decision makng based on intellect rather than emotion) then we can assuredly do so for all other emotions.

This is one basic difference between humans and other ainmals. While we may all feel fear, animals have only limited preprogrammed means of reacting to that fear. Humans have almost unlimited choices in their response. . Thus the intellectual component of emotions is significant, and the basis for my opinion that animals feel a very few emotions compared with humans and that the word emotion does not mean the same thing when applied to an animal as a human.

This is because only a human has any conscious recognition of what they are feeling, and thereby the ability to analyse and respond to the physical emotion, creating a combination of a physical and intellectual emotion, unique to humans.

To me the homunculi is not an impossible entity. It is something i have recognised in myself and utilisd effectively since my pre teenage years.

Speaking about Vulcans remember that the Klingons also have emotions. When they were once accused of not even crying at the funerals of their own it was said the only reason for that was because they lacked tear ducts.

Wow apparently they also made a 2-headed dog. They stitched the head of a puppy onto the neck of another bigger dog. American surgeons even took the brain of a dog out of its head and put it under the skin of another dog's neck .

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/art...nkensteins.html

The monkey head transplant is towards the bottom.

Hormones and for us females that loose touch once a month..YEP it's too much hormons lol

We evolved ..the hormones are only part of us that control our feelings

Sexual
non sexual
Feeling sad
Feeling happy
Feeling anger, lust, greed, hate, love, all of those things...I believe are controlled by hormoes that send messages to the brain

I have had an under active thyroid..I wondered as to why my weight wont shift when I cut out a lot of eating rubbish and I love to exercise just love it..I do it to help my back get stronger..but the weight still wont budge..so last thursday I went to have a blood test to see if it were my thyroid that was causing the trouble...results show it sure was

Thyroid - controls a lot of hormones...its like constant PMT LOL but with treatment I will get over it

Sounds like Island of DR Meureau.

I think The spirit Resides in the whole body , and when the body dies it is set free, if a part of its former body is still living, it would naturally gravitate twards that part.

But generally speaking There is only one spirit per body, Two spirits can live in the same body for a short time, but conflict is bound to kill the body. one must leave.

Love Omnaka

So you believe that hormones are a spirit?? do you?

I believe everything in the physical realm is made of spirit, including but not limited to Hormoans and computers.

My bow has a wonderful spirit which hits it's mark 9 times out of ten with assistance from The Archer's spirit.

Love Omnaka

computers? ohh my that is strange..sorry but it is

Good topic Fate..

Slave 4 Feelings

Love
Anger
Pride
Ego
.
.
.
.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Gloria Steinem, "If Men Could Menstruate"

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109...menstruate.html

Thanx

I was just wondering, why emotion? It seems to me that emotions get in the way of our ability to survive as a species. It seems to keep us from unifying as a race(or is at least partially responsible). That would seem to me as our best bet for long term survival. I suppose the question is moot but it is still interesting to ponder

The primary instinct of any living thing is survival and most of our emotions stem from that.

Plants live without emotion and have effectively done so for a long time but a sentient plant species wouldn't live long without emotion because it wouldn't see a need to live. Without Pride it wouldn't care that it species lives on, without Ego it wouldn't care to better itself, without Love it wouldn't care if every other plant dies, without hope it wouldn't care to continue to survive in rough times, without fear it would do dangerous things and end up getting itself killed, etc. but by being non sentient and unaware of itself it just exists unknowingly, and will reproduce and feed itself just because it doesn't even know its doing it.

Why do plants remain non sentient while animals became self aware and humans evolved into intelligent sentient beings? Who knows.

Yea, emotions obviously arent needed for survival or even propagation, there are many living organisms that do it daily. It still seems odd to me that we would have them though if that was all there was to life, just survival. And evolution doesn't offer any other reason for existence.

Emotions are needed for a sentient species to survive. I think the question your trying to get at is why did evolution produce sentience or self aware living organisms. My only answer would be that somewhere down the line sentience was required for the survival of a species or possibly an anomaly in the evolutionary line.

Why assume there has to be a greater reason for existence?

Humans as an evolutionary anomaly is a little disconcerting and if there's no reason for existence, then ALL life would be like nothing more than some spreading disease or cancer. Theres gotta be more to it than that, at least i hope

Well there doesn't have to be more then that.

Think of everything else in the universe...plants, water, gases, rocks, stars, planets, etc. do they have any higher or greater purpose or function to their existence? If they don't then why should we?

As they say life is what you make of it...that may not be any more then that.

"What is the purpose of life? Perhaps it is the most profound enigmatic reason...to live"

interesting link. lol.

but women still have more estrogen than males. where males produce more testosterone. that is why women don't behave like men all month long.

of course there are exceptions to the rule. some men are more sensitive than others and some women less.

some women are 'less' rational and more emotional before , during and after their periods. Some are rational and have level emotional levels no matter period or not.

Many men are less rational due to testosterone all the time .

I think it would be worse to not feel emotion. alexythimia or sometimes Schizophrenia

I agree, it must suck to be like an ant or jellyfish or something

Glad you liked it, Lieutenant.

What I was actually looking for and couldn't find was an interview Gloria Steinem gave on another occasion, about the fitness of women for executive positions. What about that time of the month, Ms. Steinem?

My recollection was that she dropped the "isn't it logical..." part from her satirical essay, which, as you say, does not reflect the actual physiology.

That left her with a punchier line, with the sense that men who complain about women a few days a month ought to look at their own behavior all month long. Not so important, then, whether the two are identical, but more that chronic testosterone dependence is not obviously much of an improvement.

This IS a great topic.

I think all the emotions, from each each end of the spectrum and everything in between, CAN be shown to have a benefit or usefulness to the survival of the species (in this case, humans) and even more specifically, to the smaller social groups (family or clan or monkeysphere)

Anger can be looked at as a tool for achieving fairness or justice for an individual. Take someone's food away, and they get mad, and try harder to get the food back.

Grief can be looked at as a preventative emotion. If one foresees the grief they will feel if someone they love dies, they are more prone to be protective or watchful. This helps to propagate the clan or family. Especially with ones children.

Love is obvious to me. We would be able to survive without love, but the family unit would not be as strong, the desire to pick one mate and stay with them and work with them to reproduce would not be nearly as possible.

Someone mentioned earlier that emotions aren't necessary to survive on this planet, and it was a correct statement. As far as we know, fungi and insects don't have emotions, and they obviously are surviving just fine. But the path that human evolution took included developing these emotions that apparently haven't done too bad for us, cause it seems we are the "dominant" species on the planet (at least WE think we are) so maybe those emotions gave us that little edge that kept us from being wiped out by other species that feel nothing?

i think animals have to have emotion

You mean you have not given your computer a name?

Mines name is Gerald. The bow is straight shot.

Love Omnaka

Oh, they do. I think people that are around animals a lot can tell you that animals feel. Most people don't think that they are as complex as human emotions, though. But it's obvious when an animal is fearful, defensive, happy, feeling safe, angry, etc. Emotions are tools used to promote survival. They aren't the only way to survive, but they obviously work for animals, and humans are no exception.

Well all the evidence points to hormones and chemical reactions associated with them. They serve different purposes in different animals some are very useful for social animals (like us), some are more useful to solitary species.
For example it is well known that testosterone is related to aggression, oxytocin is associated with love, seratonin is associated with happiness.

Gerald...ine <--my real name...I get geri for short

no I havent gave my laptop a name lol..no wait I have gave it lots..when it freezes or goes slow it gets called manys a name..but I cant repeat those names on here

hehe i suppose my question should have been why did we evolve emotion instead of where they come from I know that external stimuli trigger internal response, and the various chemical responses that go about actually doing that. More interesting to me was the WHY though

Maybe you should look it up in the bible (if you believe it to be the inspired word of god-that is) or pray so that god may give you the answers.

“Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”


This passage suggests that God will give whatever is needed to those who have the faith to ask for it.

When you get your answer let us know.

You have taken that in other way.. eMotion have the ability to survice/hope us species to keep in Motion/Change.

Think of a person who is in coma.. No feeling or hope to do anything.. but still living..

We need feeling to run... but if any of this feeling is not listening to you... it means that you started to listening to that... you bcom slave..

I don't have exact numbers so I can't be positive but didn't homo sapiens appear long before civilization. And haven't humans been hunter-gatherers much longer than they've been civilized. Wouldn't this indicate that our brains evolved for a much more primitive lifestyle and as such most of our emotions no longer serve a purpose in modern society. Most emotions seems selfish. You are only interested in your own survival and the survival of anyone that can help pass on your genetic makeup (be it mate, parent, sibling, or trusted friend). I think the will to survive as a species is a necessary emotion, but if everyone was logical then anger, sadness, etc... seem outdated.

True I also think things such as racism also stem from that primitive instinct because in a herd or pack of animals they will attack anything that isn't one of their group and see them as a potential threat. It suprising how much of our base animal instinct is still very much apart of us.

Yes, I dont think we have come as far as people like to think.

Amen to that.

I think we kind of stopped evolving actually. Evolution is no longer all that necessary when you can just adapt the rest of the world to suit you needs. There are plenty of emotions and traits we have today that may have helped us in the distant past, but now only cause conflict and problems.

You don't stop evolving, even if you don't need to small changes will always occur and genetic drift will always occur.

Well, I'm not sure about that. You are right in a sense that genetic drift may occur, but evolution is a process that is borne from the necessity to adapt in order to survive. There are plenty of examples of living organisms that have been virtually the same for millions of years, they are suited well enough to their environment that evolution has not been necessary. Humans are a bit different because we have changed our environment to adapt to us, or we have used things not available to evolution (antibiotics, weapons, etc) to adapt ourselves.

I've been doing some thinking on the matter, and humans most likely aren't the end result of evolution(if there even IS an end result). Emotions and high(relatively) intelligence could just be an evolutionary "hiccup". The dominant species a few million years from now might not even have intelligence or emotion at all.

Even with animals that have been around for millions of years it is rare that they are still the same species. Even the way we breed causes evolutionary change thanks to social structure (which very much affects people). We also cover a wide range of habitats and some of those are quite isolated and so we are still subject to environmental change and it clearly will still effect us. We may want to be separated from nature, but we are not.
There is also of course disease. They don't stop evolving so neither will we.