Emotion As A Quantifiable State
This has bothered me for a while-- so much so that I've started and failed to finish several oppressively long essays on the subject. But let's get one thing straight:
Emotion is a quantifiable state.
I'm so damn tired of this 20th century mindset that emotion is something extraphysical-- something supernatural, if you will. It is a malignant misunderstanding, and it fuels several massively damaging inferences:
1) Emotion represents proof of a nonphysical human identity beyond the physical self.
The fear of death is a huge motivator, and human beings are understandably keenly interested in finding proof that we will endure in some way after our bodies stop functioning. But while this fear is legitimate, it is no excuse for ignoring reality. It has become clear that our emotions, reactions, behaviours and identities-- everything we once, in our ignorance, referred to as a "soul"-- are in fact chemical and electrical patterns stored and acted out physically in the brain. When a person's brain is no longer functioning in those areas where emotion and identity are stored, that person is gone in every sense of the word. This is terrifying, don't get me wrong-- but I believe that if we were to remove the survivors' fear of death, we would never even think to speculate on the existence of an extracorporeal self. There would be no reason to see ourselves as anything but physical. Which brings us to our second myth:
2) Emotion (and by extrapolation, our motivation as human beings) would be meaningless if viewed as a merely physical entity.
The discovery that emotion exists physically, to me, would seem to actually legitimize rather than devalue the experience of it. And it certainly doesn't follow that something physical is meaningless. Emotion evolved to serve a purpose; the mind takes time to consciously reason, and in survival, split-second decisions must be made. Further, the evolution of something as high-level as conscious reasoning takes countless generations to form. Our ur-ancestors had to be motivated, for example, to run before they knew what they were running from, and did not necessarily have the luxury of taking the time or burning the calories it took to sustain a mind with the capacity to ruminate on it later. Hence the evolution of fear. Emotion is simply a crude but lightning-quick form of reason.
Further, emotion is not useless to a society that recognises it for what it is. It is still a powerful motivator and an extremely efficient decision-maker. But harnessing those powers without becoming dependent upon them in all situations requires that we are intimately familiar with our emotions, their triggers, their appropriateness, and their shortcomings. This, unfortunately, would require a good deal more self-awareness and psychological health than our society would currently facilitate, but that's another essay for another day. On to our next myth:
3) Emotion represents the distinction between the proverbial Man and Machine.
In my mind, machines were threatening to previous generations because of fears that the more human in nature or function machines became, the more they would devalue the human being. I think these fears are founded, especially so long as we find our value in our collective ability to perform laborious or tedious tasks. But it does not seem to me that our value should lie in how many railroad spikes we can knock into a mountainside in a given period of time. If our worth as beings lies in the ability to find merit in working ourselves to death for the preservation of a life of meaningless menial misery for the many and exploitative sadism for the "lucky" few, then I should rather be worthless in the eyes of those who would name me so. Our physical abilities should not be the gauge by which we measure our strength.
This became clear once menial machines sat comfortably in our homes, performing the physical labours which once were a burden to us. "Well," we said, "maybe machines can act, but they can't think." But soon we found ourselves again afraid of being devalued, but this time on the intellectual front. In fiction, the 20th century often comforts itself with the creation of robot or android characters who, being entirely physically constructed (and therefore not theoretically imparted with a "soul"), are unable to experience emotion, and as such are tragic, incomplete entities at best and terrifying monsters at worst. These characters are clearly the result of an insecure, self-congratulating populace clinging to the erroneous assumption that it would be impossible to construct a machine with the capacity for emotion. "So maybe they can think," we said then, "but they can't feel. Yes, that one thing science has yet to quantify-- emotion. That must be what sets us apart." Which brings us to:
4) Emotion is the opposite of, and often better than, reason.
And so we were sold this vision of emotion as romantic-- emotion was feral, inexplicable, supernatural. It was what made us human, it was our connection to the divine and we were to trust it over our ability to reason. Hell, it transcended reason, according to virtually all of the media which dealt with the concept. But as undesirable as a life validated only by physical labour may have been, it seems to me similarly disadvantageous to place all our worth on a delusional and malformed assumption that a single quality unexplained must be proof of some sort of human divinity, particularly when divinity itself is a dubious concept.
We don't need to be special or supernatural to deserve to value ourselves as a race. We don't need to be better than that which we create. We don't need a purpose other than the sustaining of ourselves. We don't need to stop caring. We just need to take our emotions into reasonable, scientific consideration.
Emotion is a quantifiable state.
I'm so damn tired of this 20th century mindset that emotion is something extraphysical-- something supernatural, if you will. It is a malignant misunderstanding, and it fuels several massively damaging inferences:
1) Emotion represents proof of a nonphysical human identity beyond the physical self.
The fear of death is a huge motivator, and human beings are understandably keenly interested in finding proof that we will endure in some way after our bodies stop functioning. But while this fear is legitimate, it is no excuse for ignoring reality. It has become clear that our emotions, reactions, behaviours and identities-- everything we once, in our ignorance, referred to as a "soul"-- are in fact chemical and electrical patterns stored and acted out physically in the brain. When a person's brain is no longer functioning in those areas where emotion and identity are stored, that person is gone in every sense of the word. This is terrifying, don't get me wrong-- but I believe that if we were to remove the survivors' fear of death, we would never even think to speculate on the existence of an extracorporeal self. There would be no reason to see ourselves as anything but physical. Which brings us to our second myth:
2) Emotion (and by extrapolation, our motivation as human beings) would be meaningless if viewed as a merely physical entity.
The discovery that emotion exists physically, to me, would seem to actually legitimize rather than devalue the experience of it. And it certainly doesn't follow that something physical is meaningless. Emotion evolved to serve a purpose; the mind takes time to consciously reason, and in survival, split-second decisions must be made. Further, the evolution of something as high-level as conscious reasoning takes countless generations to form. Our ur-ancestors had to be motivated, for example, to run before they knew what they were running from, and did not necessarily have the luxury of taking the time or burning the calories it took to sustain a mind with the capacity to ruminate on it later. Hence the evolution of fear. Emotion is simply a crude but lightning-quick form of reason.
Further, emotion is not useless to a society that recognises it for what it is. It is still a powerful motivator and an extremely efficient decision-maker. But harnessing those powers without becoming dependent upon them in all situations requires that we are intimately familiar with our emotions, their triggers, their appropriateness, and their shortcomings. This, unfortunately, would require a good deal more self-awareness and psychological health than our society would currently facilitate, but that's another essay for another day. On to our next myth:
3) Emotion represents the distinction between the proverbial Man and Machine.
In my mind, machines were threatening to previous generations because of fears that the more human in nature or function machines became, the more they would devalue the human being. I think these fears are founded, especially so long as we find our value in our collective ability to perform laborious or tedious tasks. But it does not seem to me that our value should lie in how many railroad spikes we can knock into a mountainside in a given period of time. If our worth as beings lies in the ability to find merit in working ourselves to death for the preservation of a life of meaningless menial misery for the many and exploitative sadism for the "lucky" few, then I should rather be worthless in the eyes of those who would name me so. Our physical abilities should not be the gauge by which we measure our strength.
This became clear once menial machines sat comfortably in our homes, performing the physical labours which once were a burden to us. "Well," we said, "maybe machines can act, but they can't think." But soon we found ourselves again afraid of being devalued, but this time on the intellectual front. In fiction, the 20th century often comforts itself with the creation of robot or android characters who, being entirely physically constructed (and therefore not theoretically imparted with a "soul"), are unable to experience emotion, and as such are tragic, incomplete entities at best and terrifying monsters at worst. These characters are clearly the result of an insecure, self-congratulating populace clinging to the erroneous assumption that it would be impossible to construct a machine with the capacity for emotion. "So maybe they can think," we said then, "but they can't feel. Yes, that one thing science has yet to quantify-- emotion. That must be what sets us apart." Which brings us to:
4) Emotion is the opposite of, and often better than, reason.
And so we were sold this vision of emotion as romantic-- emotion was feral, inexplicable, supernatural. It was what made us human, it was our connection to the divine and we were to trust it over our ability to reason. Hell, it transcended reason, according to virtually all of the media which dealt with the concept. But as undesirable as a life validated only by physical labour may have been, it seems to me similarly disadvantageous to place all our worth on a delusional and malformed assumption that a single quality unexplained must be proof of some sort of human divinity, particularly when divinity itself is a dubious concept.
We don't need to be special or supernatural to deserve to value ourselves as a race. We don't need to be better than that which we create. We don't need a purpose other than the sustaining of ourselves. We don't need to stop caring. We just need to take our emotions into reasonable, scientific consideration.