By “narrow down”, I actually meant “narrow down prior to conscious evaluation”—not consciously evaluate for truth or falsehood. You can consciously evaluate whatever you like, and you can certainly check a statement for factual accuracy without the use of emotion. But that’s not what the sentence is talking about… it’s referring to the sorting or scoring function of emotion in selecting what memories to retrieve, or hypotheses to consider, before you actually evaluate them.
Still either false or meaningless, depending on how you interpret ‘emotion’. Our brains narrow things down prior to conscious evaluation. It’s their speciality. If you hacked out the limbic system you would still be left with a whole bunch of cortex that is good at narrowing things down without conscious evaluation. In fact, if you hacked out the frontal lobes you would end up with tissue that retained the ability to narrow things down without being able to conscoiusly evaluate anything.
The point of emotions—which I see I failed to make sufficiently explicit in this post, from the frequent questions about it—is that their original purpose was to prepare the body to take some physical, real-world action… and thus they were built in to our memory/prediction systems long before we reused those systems to “think” or “reason” with.
Brains weren’t originally built for thinking—they were built for emoting: motivating co-ordinated physical action.
Still either false or meaningless, depending on how you interpret ‘emotion’. Our brains narrow things down prior to conscious evaluation. It’s their speciality. If you hacked out the limbic system you would still be left with a whole bunch of cortex that is good at narrowing things down without conscious evaluation. In fact, if you hacked out the frontal lobes you would end up with tissue that retained the ability to narrow things down without being able to conscoiusly evaluate anything.
The point of emotions—which I see I failed to make sufficiently explicit in this post, from the frequent questions about it—is that their original purpose was to prepare the body to take some physical, real-world action… and thus they were built in to our memory/prediction systems long before we reused those systems to “think” or “reason” with.
Brains weren’t originally built for thinking—they were built for emoting: motivating co-ordinated physical action.