Many of our emotions can be thought of as shortcuts for reasoning. Not so much simple states of happiness and sadness, which are more affective descriptions, but emotions like fear, anger, hope, love, envy, jealousy and so on. These emotions prompt actions. But in principle, such actions are in most cases the same ones that a fully rational and unemotional person would take. Fear makes you run from danger—exactly what a rational person would do. Love makes you protect your allies—again, a rational action. The value of the emotions is that they shortcut what might be a slow rational decision, and also that they are available to lesser animals who do not have our developed sense of rationality.
One place we might look for alien emotions, then, is to shortcut other aspects of rationality. Aliens might have a strategic-move emotion, that would activate in games like chess or in comparable strategic situations. This would manifest as an urgent subconscious drive to make a certain move in such situations.
A simpler example would be an emotional drive to eat. We have hunger, but that is just a sensation. And sometimes people do acquire emotional connotations for eating. But aliens could have a feeding emotion, as urgent in its way as fear or love, but as different as these two, and directed towards eating.
Any biological behavior could acquire a corresponding emotional drive. Aliens might even give themselves emotions. Imagine aliens who have emotions helping them to overcome bias. Perhaps they have an emotional abhorrence of disagreement, so that the idea of consummating a bet fills them with horror. They might look at our society with barely restrained disgust and disdain.
A simpler example would be an emotional drive to eat. We have hunger, but that is just a sensation.
A majority of people in first-world countries not on a weight-loss diet or something seldom feel real hunger (as opposed to appetite), and the “I wouldn’t mind a snack right now” feeling (despite having had lunch a couple of hours before) feels much more like an emotion such as missing someone or being worried than like a sensation such as having to pee or feeling cold.
Many of our emotions can be thought of as shortcuts for reasoning. Not so much simple states of happiness and sadness, which are more affective descriptions, but emotions like fear, anger, hope, love, envy, jealousy and so on. These emotions prompt actions. But in principle, such actions are in most cases the same ones that a fully rational and unemotional person would take. Fear makes you run from danger—exactly what a rational person would do. Love makes you protect your allies—again, a rational action. The value of the emotions is that they shortcut what might be a slow rational decision, and also that they are available to lesser animals who do not have our developed sense of rationality.
One place we might look for alien emotions, then, is to shortcut other aspects of rationality. Aliens might have a strategic-move emotion, that would activate in games like chess or in comparable strategic situations. This would manifest as an urgent subconscious drive to make a certain move in such situations.
A simpler example would be an emotional drive to eat. We have hunger, but that is just a sensation. And sometimes people do acquire emotional connotations for eating. But aliens could have a feeding emotion, as urgent in its way as fear or love, but as different as these two, and directed towards eating.
Any biological behavior could acquire a corresponding emotional drive. Aliens might even give themselves emotions. Imagine aliens who have emotions helping them to overcome bias. Perhaps they have an emotional abhorrence of disagreement, so that the idea of consummating a bet fills them with horror. They might look at our society with barely restrained disgust and disdain.
A majority of people in first-world countries not on a weight-loss diet or something seldom feel real hunger (as opposed to appetite), and the “I wouldn’t mind a snack right now” feeling (despite having had lunch a couple of hours before) feels much more like an emotion such as missing someone or being worried than like a sensation such as having to pee or feeling cold.