THE MIND
Brain vs. Mind
Perception
Emotion
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Emotion
Cognitive Goals
How could something like an emotion be explained scientifically? Though the feeling of having an emotion can´t truly be explained, cognitive scientists have defined an emotion, or the basis of an emotion, as a goal along with methods for achieving it.
The first "emotions" are things like hunger, thirst, desire to be close to one´s mother, desire to be free of discomfort and frightening situations, and a desire to be intellectually stimulated. At first these emotions may act in competition with one another. Say a baby´s emotions motivate him to want to play, sleep, or cry for food. What she does will depend on the relative strength of these rivals at a given time. She may start playing and continue until, chemically, a desire for food takes control and she begins to cry. After this desire is satisfied she may desire to play again, but once again chemical factors will eventually cause sleep to take control.
As with the example above, when a baby cries rather than looks for food when they are hungry, most of the techniques babies use to satisfy their desires rely on getting the help of other, older people. Even from birth babies are good at perceiving the emotions of others and expressing their own. (It would seem easier to make models of physical things, using only information about their shapes, mass and speeds. However, even into adulthood most people have a more intuitive understanding of "social objects," or people, than physical objects. We understand, for example, that electricity "wants," to complete a circuit, or that biochemical systems "seek" equilibrium.)
The strong sympathy we feel for a crying baby may be partly because she stimulates the remnants of our own infant emotions, this time with helping someone else as their goal. Our ability to empathize or sympathize with someone else, and our ability to learn by copying others were recently linked to the discovery of "mirror neurons." These are groups of neurons which are stimulated both when an action (such as crying or climbing a set of stairs) is perceived in others, and when the same action is done by yourself. The strength of both empathy and learning depend on our views of how relevant we perceive the person we are perceiving to be to us.
Satisfaction and Development of Personality
As the child grows, desires begin to cooperate for the perceived ultimate good of the child. A high school student studying late into the night may mediate between his desires to sleep and study. ("Just a few more hours now, sleep, and then tomorrow after the test we´ll come home and have a long nap." Or even simply, "Sleep, this is for our own good.")
As a personality develops from this synchronizing of once discrete goals, the question becomes, what emotions are there? Most people recognize things like happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, shock and love. Cognitive science suggests that as many different goals grow into one ever-adapting, comprehensive goal, our emotional states correspond to the perceived state of that goal´s completion. For instance, happiness corresponds to perceived completion of much of our goal for that period, anger or sadness to perceived lack of completion of the goal (the latter especially when we feel powerless to complete the goal ourselves) and shock may correspond to a gap between the direction of our goal and some new information.
But what about emotions like love, hate, admiration, and compassion? They are all focused on a specific person or people. As affecting a person becomes more and more important for meeting our goals and subgoals, affecting that person may become a subgoal or goal itself (as through wanting them to be happy, wanting to impress them or be with them, etc.)
Emotional Processing
Do we make our decisions based on how we feel or do we decide how we feel? Both are constantly happening. Although we can´t choose immediately or directly to stop feeling certain sensations (if we could convince ourselves we were never hungry, for example, we would die), we can choose what "meaning" we ascribe to those sensations. Just ask a long-distance runner who views the pain of a marathon as representing some final pleasure. Nothing we think or do lacks an emotional background or cause.
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