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Comment by aluminum96 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

That’s interesting. Any chance you remember which study it was?

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).

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.

Damasio bases his conclusions on his own patients, not Phineas Gage, who is provided as a famous example for historical context. The only reason I'm mentioning only him by name is I remember his name and I do not remember the names of Damasio's patients. I actually think he doesn't even give their real names since they're patients and subject to confidentiality laws.

Fair enough! I'm not familiar with the book.

Not OP but I also looked into it and agree: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2019.0001...

I wish I did. I'll take a look later and see if I can dig them up.

context on what kind of decision, at that time of day or night, under what mental conditions.. would be very telling.. too broad as stated

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 ?

No more "purposeful" than a bag of chemicals, or molecules in a gas, bumping into each other at random, really.

emotions give reasons to live and reasons to end life.

there is no purpose without emotions.

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