nizo's Journal: Why are emotions advantageous, evolutionarily speaking?

So I was sitting there thinking today, why are emotions advantageous, from an evolutionary standpoint? I mean certainly they must be, right? Wouldn't purely logical (as opposed to emotional) behaviour increase a species chance of survival?

And even more intriguing to consider, are emotions a requirement for intelligence?

I couldn't find much, even this link wasn't very enlightening:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web2/reineke2.html

Consider this

[Elpacoloco]

I am Elp the caveman. I come out of my cave, and observe that there is an angry bear approaching me. What's a good response:

* OH SH*T! HIDE, YOU DUMBF*CK!!!
or
* Oh hum, a bear, let's attempt to communicate. Perhaps it would like to trade honey for this cache of berries I found?

Emotions gave us the first response, and it kept us alive. Animals that sat around and thought about what to do about the angry bear got eaten. Animals that freaked out and hid survived.

Other emotions also encouraged c

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[nizo]

But see I don't equate emotion with physiological response i.e. fight or flight adrenaline rush could still happen, but what keeps the brain from remaining logically in control? Or is that impossible? And how many people ran off a cliff at first sight of an big angry bear because they acted without thinking? Apparently not enough to make a dent in the population....

Maybe it is all about a happy medium (i.e. acting v.s. thinking)?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Captain Splendid]

I'm pretty sure I remember reading somewhere a long time ago something to the effect that emotions help "sear" memories in the brain more effectively - the more eventful and dramatic the moment is, the more likely you are to remember it.

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[nizo]

What I want to know is are emotions required for true intelligence or not? It may be awhile before we answer that question.

Well, social groups are clearly advantageous

[bersl2]

Empathy and emotions are a means to hold social groups of relatively intelligent animals together.

Might that explanation work?

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[nizo]

So a group of emotional people is more likely to survive than a group of logical people? Somehow I don't buy that; it seems like a group able to make decisions based on logic without being swayed by emotion would have a better chance of survival. But maybe we are the "happy medium" between randomly emotional and "coldly logical"?

It does occur to me however that we evolved as an emotional species, and now we have no choice, since people who behave logically (with less emotion) might indeed be better able to

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[bersl2]

The problem with your thinking is that you consider emotions a human thing; I think of emotions as mammalian, something which we inherited.

As for whether changing the nature of our emotions can be advantageous, I cannot say. However, I can say that malfunctions of our emotions can result in large numbers of people dying.

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[The Fun Guy]

Logic says, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or of the one. Grandpa can't hunt anymore, and he eats more than he brings in. Kill him and eat him. Once he's dead, he's nothing more than a carcass to be used. I don't expect any more or less when I get old."

Net result: Very little transfer of abstract information among people sitting around in camp (those too young and too old to work), so societal development is slow. Pathogens that live in human tissue are propagated via cannibalism. Lit

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[nizo]

Ahh, but a logical being would (I assume) see the reasoning behind not eating Grampa, right? In other words, the value of keeping him around makes sense (at least until food becomes scarce, then he might be the first to go). Granted none of those reasons would have even occurred to humans prior to microscopes and sociology......

NP-complete

[benhocking]

Part of the problem is that many such questions (such as the Grandpa dilemma) are essentially NP-complete. Thus, we need an imperfect heuristic to give us an answer in a relatively quick time. (If we wait too long to think about whether to eat Grandpa or not, he'll die of neglect and won't have enough meat on him to be worth the trouble.) Emotions are arguably part of those heuristics.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

So a group of emotional people is more likely to survive than a group of logical people?

More that a group of emotional people are more likely to band together in the first place than a group of logical individualists- and groups have a better survival rate than individuals.

But to answer your first question, the same thing that makes everything else advantageous- survival and sex. The harsher emotions that "take over your brain" completely are directly related to survival (fight or flight) and sex (lust

Daniel Dennett's two cents

[Morosoph]

Empathy and emotions are a means to hold social groups of relatively intelligent animals together.

Might that explanation work?

It's not enough in itself, but Daniel Dennett gave a possible explanation in his book "Freedom Evolves". I've lent the book out, so I can't speak for the accuracy of transcription. But his theory (IIRC) is that there are evolutionary pressures behind virtue, starting with the ubiquitous prisoners' dilemma. The point of emotion is to be visibly not in control, for paradoxically, that engenders trust: emotions are hard to fake.

Cool rationalisation gives a lot more room for subterfuge, and so even if we

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[queenofthe1ring]

Cool rationalisation gives a lot more room for subterfuge, and so even if we could act better with a cool head, we can also betray more easily, and as a result we trust those who don't keep a cool head more.

Bingo.

Being, I guess, the "emotional one" they tried to fool me with the logic. In the beginning I was out-logicked, until the logic was overconfident and made a mistake. Emotions won.

And nizo... the creepy logic people don't necessarily freak out all mates. They just attract other creepy

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[nizo]

Heh well what you said does bring up the obvious thing to consider now: evolution is still happening, though the characteristics that once may have helped with survival (or hindered it) are now totally different than they were even a few thousand years ago. Especially now that we can start monkeying around with genes. Assuming we don't off ourselves (intentionally or not), it should be interesting to see what happens in the long run. Granted I won't be around to see evolution in action (darwin awards aside)

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[Morosoph]

Being, I guess, the "emotional one" they tried to fool me with the logic. In the beginning I was out-logicked, until the logic was overconfident and made a mistake. Emotions won.

If you look carefully, you'll notice that "logic" and "rationality" is often used when a more accurate term would often be simply "structure". Given how bad the structure often is, "crackpot theory" is appropriate really quite often.

People often think that self-consistency is enough, but the real test is consitency with the outside world.

Disclaimer: I have "Asperger's Syndrome", but I've always been good at reading character, if not the immeadiate situation.

Who said they were?

[Yaztromo]

Who said that emotions are evolutionly advantageous in the first place? It could be that it's simply a simpler state that requires less energy to reach. Humanity isn't necessarily at an evolutionary pinnacle -- it could be that pure, cold logic is the better evolutionary advantageous state for us to be in, but that we simply haven't reached that state yet. It could also be that reaching this state requires higher energy input than we have currently achieved.

That being said, the emotional stuff can be a

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[nizo]

Right; I posted elsewhere that maybe now that we have evolved as emotional, it might be very difficult to become a non-emotional species. It (logically :-D) seems that logic should win out, and yet here we are, petty and emotional and illogical (most but not all of the time). Interesting.

The emotional stuff

[benhocking]

Exactly. Where's the logic in living a joyless life?

My opinion

[JesseL]

I think emotions are how we perceive our animal instincts as they are filtered through our higher levels of cognition. They are the precursor and foundation for our more advanced levels of intellect, and are still fundamental to the basic structure of our minds.

Emotions may not be particularly advantageous as compared with a 100% logical mind, but there isn't any simple evolutionary path from here to there.

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[nizo]

Yeah I was kinda thinking along the same lines (though you formed it into a coherent thought better than I could) :-)

It occurs to me that either a) robotic AI isn't possible because emotions are critical to higher thought (not likely, but possible I suppose) or b) AI without emotion is possible, and will supplant us (well I guess there could be a c) we give them emotions so they are just as "weak" as us). Though the idea of petty emotional robots sounds scary to me too.

Mammalian brain

[SEWilco]

Look up the limbic system [wikipedia.org]. Emotions developed in mammals, and we are mammals. Consider their evolutionary advantages to mammals, not in humans. Humans have barely been around long enough for evolution to have any effect upon us.

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[nizo]

From the fine wikipedia article:

Patients who underwent this procedure often became passive and lacked all motivation.

And maybe this is the key: in an effort to meet (seemingly random) needs and desires, we do stuff, instead of just sit around (like we really could have done more often when all of our basic survival needs were met). Some of the stuff we do gets us killed, some of it does nothing, but some of it leads to something better that wouldn't have happened if we had just sat around all day, with the

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[Talinom]

Check out this wiki article on clinical depression [wikipedia.org]. I haven't been diagnosed with that but have had Seasonal Affective Disorder [wikipedia.org].

Depression, or lack of feeling as I know it, sucks badly. You know what sensory deprivation [wikipedia.org] can do to a person. Imagine what emotive deprivation could do to a person.

From my experience it is like the world has gone gray. You don't notice it at first because it is so gradual, however if you know to analyze it (or rather make yourself care enough to do so) you will notice that

Good reference work

[Billosaur]

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales [amazon.com]

I've read this book more than 20 times. It's gripping, and while it is a book about how and why people survive extraordinary situations, Gonzales goes into some detail about the difference between logic reasoning and emotional reasoning, which often has a lot to do with who survives. The emotional system is apparently a short-cut, to allow an organism to react to a situation on a shorter timescale than if the reaction had to be reasoned out

They're not advantageous

[Shadow Wrought]

So much as vestigial. You know, from when our ancestors used to communicate telepathicly before we discovered "speech."

Well, it's hard to say

[sam_handelman]

Firstly, what is "logical" behavior? It generally depends on the goals of the animal - emotions might be said to provide such a goalset. In any case, there is no clean definition (as far as we can discern) between the emotional and rational structures of the brain. The different parts of the brain do, in *some* instances, seem to map to different sorts of behavior, but the distinction only makes sense from the standpoint of how the brain is wired up, it isn't divided into logical and emotional bits, howeve