Love this piece on the role of #emotion in #science & #research!! So many thoughts, but YES decision & action are inextricably tied to #emotions, including for scientists. When people talk about rational #logic they often assemble 'facts' to confirm their own emotion-based biases. Acknowledging the role of emotions in research improves our science. @BPSOfficial https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/emotions-essential-part-science
Interesting take. I wonder if it is important in this context to realize that emotions are but a subset of our subjective experience (the subset that is coupled to significant physiological responses, and thus presumably "older" in evolution). But for sure, the role of subjectivity in science is underappreciated. We hear so often that "science is objective" - but it is not: it is "shared subjectivity" (which is actually far more interesting).
Your comment on our major mode of thinking being a rationalizing justification of intuitions is spot on. I wrote on that over the last days, now posted for #Sentientsyllabus where I analyze why it is so hard to get the question of #AIauthorship right. That mechanism plays a major role.
@boris_steipe Interesting thoughts, esp considering the role of AI. The evolutionary role of #emotions is to direct our attention & help filter out stimulus that is not important at this point in time. Within that frame, emotions become central to everything we undertake and the Q then becomes WHY do we think this is important?
After reading Burnett's post, I was a bit disappointed that he did not seem to distinguish between #emotions, specifically, and #affects, more generally. And I thought that he is missing part of the richness of our subjective experience, such as intuition, or specifically the sense of "understanding". He is probably using the term metonymously, so it doesn't matter for his argument; but I find the distinction interesting because - that's how I think about it - it points to _older_ affects, like love and fear, that are linked to our physiology, and more _recent_ affects, like confusion and understanding, that are not.
I was not sure how to read the WHY. Did you mean "why we think emotions are important" or "what was it that triggered a response that must not be filtered out"?
@boris_steipe His argument is very proscribed.... What I meant by WHY is the why we have emotions at all - what purpose or advantage do they serve?
To me intuition is separate to emotions (and perhaps he addresses this more in the book, which I've not read). Intuition is a kind of a 'short cut' of the brain processing information so quickly that we can't follow the pathway. What is folded into the pathway may be 'good' or 'bad' inputs, it needs to be disected.
It's unfortunate that there does (to my knowledge) not exist a model that maps terms like affect / emotion / intuition / mood - into a unified construct with clear demarcations. "Intuition" is a case in point. There is literature that distinguishes holistic,
inferential, and affective intuition - thus a multi-dimensional concept.
From time to time I find myself coming back to this question – until I realize that nothing short of a full model of the mind will do, to bring order to the categories; nor will whatever one can come up with map neatly to the "common" use of the words.
Why we have emotions? I agree with your point about focus and filtering. I would take the fact that they are experienced along multiple dimensions - feeling / arousal / awareness etc. - to indicate a role in integrating these dimensions, and thus making focus and filtering possible.
(As I write this, I feel that this is a good way to think about "mind" - thanks for inspiring that. I might need to get back to my unified model once again ... 🙂 )
@boris_steipe Build that model! Can wait to see it.