Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 23, 2002, at 14:52:54
In reply to Re: addendum » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Mal on September 23, 2002, at 12:11:09
>do you think this "emotion" part of the brain might be at the root of the biological clock that women (and perhaps men, in a "midlife crisis") experience? Thoughts and emotions spur one to take action to procreate?
-------------------------I've always been fascinated by the relationship between thoughts and emotions. Which causes which? I've come to think that the situation is mutable, with thoughts causing emotions, and emotions causing thoughts. Ultimately, though, I see things falling back to my previous posting, where emotions are the body's responses to specific stimuli, and in the case of thoughts causing emotions, the referral of the thought to a previous experience which caused emotion.
Say that whenever you experience isolation, you become sad. That's a stimulus-response situation. Now say that something happens in your life to make you *think* that you'll be isolated (you see a pattern that leads you to believe that). Your brain accesses it's emotional link to the experience of isolation, and you become sad.
The weird thing is that people, based on their experiences, create different associations. The response table I referred to in my other post is very general, with a handful of rules to the effect of "be around people. touch people. avoid physical pain." As babies, these simple rules are all we follow. As we advance, however, we begin to assign ever more complex associations between events and those basic emotional rules, but it's all just an elaborate refinement of them.
Much like the rumbling of your stomach tells you to eat, your emotions spur you to fulfill your social/reproductive needs. If it weren't for emotions, why would we ever do anything? What would be the payoff? It's why I'm not concerend about robots or computers becoming really smart and taking over the world (unless they were programmed specifically to do so). Why would they want to? Without emotion there is no sense of motivation, satisfaction, pain, or reason.
The ultimate craziness is that the potential for all of this behavior and diversity of action comes from, essentially, our lowly genetic code.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:1117
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1123.html