Damisio’s view of the brain is very interesting stuff. His book Descartes’ Error is a fairly easy introduction to it.
This is my view of why the brain and reasoning works off usefulness and emotion.
Consider the genes eye view of the brain. You want to control what a very complex and changeable system does so that it will propagate more of you, so you find a way to hook what and how that system behaves into signals from the body such as hunger, discomfit and desire. Because you can directly control those signals, you can get it do what you want. The genes don’t want to directly control what the brain does, its purpose is to adapt on their behalf.
Damisio’s view of the brain is very interesting stuff. His book Descartes’ Error is a fairly easy introduction to it.
This is my view of why the brain and reasoning works off usefulness and emotion.
Consider the genes eye view of the brain. You want to control what a very complex and changeable system does so that it will propagate more of you, so you find a way to hook what and how that system behaves into signals from the body such as hunger, discomfit and desire. Because you can directly control those signals, you can get it do what you want. The genes don’t want to directly control what the brain does, its purpose is to adapt on their behalf.