This statement is either false or meaningless, depending on how you interpret “emotion”.
Let’s review the statement in question:
Without emotion, you have no way to narrow down the field of “all possible hypotheses” to “potentially useful hypotheses” or “likely to be true” hypotheses...
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.
I disagree again: I don’t think that any reasonable definition of emotion makes the following statement true: :
emotions allow you to (prior to conscious evaluation) narrow down the field of “all possible hypotheses” to “likely to be true” hypotheses.
I think that emotions often do the opposite. They narrow down the field of “all possible hypotheses” to “likely to make me feel good about myself if I believe it” hypotheses and “likely to support my preexisting biases about the world” hypotheses, which is precisely the problem that this site is tackling… if emotions subconsciously selected “likely to be true” hypotheses, we would not be in the somewhat problematic situation we are in.
think that emotions often do the opposite. They narrow down the field of “all possible hypotheses” to “likely to make me feel good about myself if I believe it” hypotheses and “likely to support my preexisting biases about the world” hypotheses, which is precisely the problem that this site is tackling… if emotions subconsciously selected “likely to be true” hypotheses, we would not be in the somewhat problematic situation we are in.
Those are subsets of what you believe to be likely true.
Right, we agree. But I think that we have overused the word emotion… That which proposes hypotheses is not exactly the same piece of brainware as that which makes you laugh and cry and love. We need different names for them. I call the latter emotion, and the former a “hypothesis generating part of your cognitive algorithm”. I think and hope that one can separate the two.
That which proposes hypotheses is not exactly the same piece of brainware as that which makes you laugh and cry and love
No… the former merely sorts those hypotheses based on information from the latter. Or more precisely, the raw data from which those hypotheses are generated, has been stored in such a manner that retrieval is prioritized on emotion, and such that any such emotions are played back as an integral part of retrieval.
One’s physio-emotional state at the time of retrieval also has an effect on retrieval priorities… if you’re angry, for example, memories tagged “angry” are prioritized.
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.
Let’s review the statement in question:
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.
I disagree again: I don’t think that any reasonable definition of emotion makes the following statement true: :
I think that emotions often do the opposite. They narrow down the field of “all possible hypotheses” to “likely to make me feel good about myself if I believe it” hypotheses and “likely to support my preexisting biases about the world” hypotheses, which is precisely the problem that this site is tackling… if emotions subconsciously selected “likely to be true” hypotheses, we would not be in the somewhat problematic situation we are in.
Those are subsets of what you believe to be likely true.
Great! Hurrah for emotions, they make you believe things that you believe are likely to be true…
epistemic rationality is about believing things that are actually true, rather than believing things that you believe to be true.
And that’s why it’s a good thing to know what you’re up against, with respect to the hardware upon which you’re trying to do that.
Right, we agree. But I think that we have overused the word emotion… That which proposes hypotheses is not exactly the same piece of brainware as that which makes you laugh and cry and love. We need different names for them. I call the latter emotion, and the former a “hypothesis generating part of your cognitive algorithm”. I think and hope that one can separate the two.
No… the former merely sorts those hypotheses based on information from the latter. Or more precisely, the raw data from which those hypotheses are generated, has been stored in such a manner that retrieval is prioritized on emotion, and such that any such emotions are played back as an integral part of retrieval.
One’s physio-emotional state at the time of retrieval also has an effect on retrieval priorities… if you’re angry, for example, memories tagged “angry” are prioritized.
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.