Feelings are heroes, and feelings are villains. They make us human, and they betray our minds and wills. It is very difficult to think clearly about emotions themselves because almost all humans live in a sea of emotions…their own as well as the perceived emotions of the people around them. Analyzing what emotions fundamentally are is almost like asking a fish to describe the wetness of water.
But maybe we can think carefully together and it will make us happy. =)
The Other Simulation In Your Head
In one of the first articles in this blog, I described how we hold a simulation of reality in our minds, and we co-opt the social simulator in our brains in order to almost instantly figure out what will happen in multiple different hypothetical situations. If you like thinking about better thinking, you might get a kick out of that article. But there is one thing that I didn’t delve into there.
We often imagine a future, maybe even just one minute ahead, and we can do so fairly accurately. But how do we decide which of those possible (simulated) futures is better?
Let’s do an example. You are standing in front of a vending machine at work. You are trying to decide between a Snickers and some Starburst.1 What happens? Well, sort of subconsciously, you imagine yourself eating a Snickers, and you imagine yourself eating some Starburst. You feel the sweet chocolate along with the hearty and salty peanuts of the Snickers. You then imagine savoring the slightly sour chewiness of the Starburst.
How do you “score” which one is better for you at this moment, so that you can make a choice? If you were writing a computer program to choose between things, the key part of that program would be scoring different choices.
That scoring calculator…that is one of the primary purposes of our emotions.
Don’t worry, I am not going to reduce emotions to an algorithm. I am going to build up and elevate them. But we have to be clear. Emotions are how we score imagined futures.
This is actually an amazing accomplishment of our brains, and presumably animal brains as well. We have a way to provide real-time feedback on the set of choices we have to make. And because we live in a balance of pleasure and pain, our emotions act as simulators of how good or bad we think we will feel if we choose A vs. B.
A very few people have a very hard time making decisions on trivial things like how to choose whether to sign their name with a blue pen or a black pen. They might sit at a desk for 10 minutes agonizing over the choice. Those people might be lacking the emotional calculator that short-circuits that indecisiveness in most of us.
Wonderfully Subjective
Further, this Imagined Future Effects Evaluator (our emotions) helps us understand one of the most perplexing things about human consciousness: Subjective Experience.
Philosophers and AI researchers and psychologists and even mathematicians and physicists these days are all grasping to explain what subjective experience is. As we create more and more sophisticated chat bots that sound more and more human, we see our own subjective experience as a major differentiator between ourselves and our machines.
But more importantly, subjective experience is how we assign value to ourselves. Our idea of who each of us is is wrapped up in our feeling of that driver that guides our body through the world. Whether you think this is solely a brain or a brain plus a soul, subjective experience is held dear by most people as a key part of the thinking in “I think, therefore I am.”
Those emotions that come from imaging different futures are of course not limited to candy bars. We use them to choose whom we date and marry. We use them to choose how many children we have. They are guides to which college degree we get, or even whether we go to or stay in college. Emotional future evaluators keep us at jobs or move us to change jobs. Emotions cannot be separated from the choices that largely define us.
Even more deeply, our moral universe is perceived almost exclusively through the lens of the “should be.” In some cases, we are taught specific rules, and in some cases we make moral choices based on what we feel is right. But in both cases, we imagine ourselves having made the bad choice, and the feeling of loss or disgust or guilt or shame associated with that choice is often THE motivating factor in whether we do the easy but bad thing.
A Laughing Matter
We also have insight into the emotions that drive laughter using this paradigm. There is a constant simulation running in our heads of what should be. We see a person walking past us, and we expect them to keep walking normally. We see a person with an egg in their right hand pass it to the other, and we expect to see an egg in their left hand. We expect a story to go a certain way.
In all those cases, our expectations are literally created by the simulation (trained neural net, if you will) calculating what comes next on a second-by-second basis. It’s a big part of how we successfully navigate a dynamic world.
But when those expectations are subverted — when we are suddenly surprised — our emotional response is laughter. A person walking past slips on a banana peel. The magician’s left hand suddenly has a side of bacon. A big, silly twist in an otherwise normal story was unforeseen, and we laugh.
In this case, our emotion is not scoring a future, but rather performing the function of rewarding us for noticing something unexpected. We get a rush of pleasant endorphins because we’ve viewed and are incorporating something new. And incorporating new things into our model is almost always useful. I also wonder if laugher is an emotional off-ramp for when we hit a “divide by zero” moment. When something happens that is so unexpected or inexplicable, a computer program might just crash. Maybe laughter is a way of hitting a mental reset, acknowledging with a smiling shrug that “well, I can’t understand what happened, but oh well!”
When Emotions Fail Us
Parts of our societies have come to look down on emotions. Certain people see emotions as a weakness, an anti-logic force. In part, they are right. Sometimes emotions can become that. We will talk below briefly about how emotions can break the chains of logic and utility in bad ways. But when used as a tool properly, emotional evaluations and emotions themselves are the primary way we navigate this world. Emotions are how we craft our future selves.
But yes, emotions can also blind us to truth. They can fail us.
When our emotional calculator is not very accurate, we are mis-evaluating the effects of our choices. We have to have a good apprehension of how our world works — physically, socially, mentally, etc.
Emotions are complex, and utilize biological and chemical feedback systems. Sometimes those feedback systems can go off the rails. Depression, being quick to anger, and excessive anxiety are a few ways that emotion creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that injures people.
Other times, we so want to see a positive outcome that we assign false emotional scoring to outcomes. We imagine that a certain positive outcome is much more likely than it actually is. Gambling impulses sadly illustrate this well. A man betting his rent on an unlikely horse winning a race is imagining the freedom and joy that comes with multiplying his rent money 10 to 1. The draw of that imagined outcome is so strong that the man rationalizes that it is much more likely than it actually is. Maybe he becomes convinced that he is owed this win by the Universe, deceiving himself.
Emotions are a fantastically powerful tool. But just like any powerful tool, they can be misused, intentionally or unintentionally, to disastrous effect. Jealousy comes from us imagining having what others have. Rage comes from imagining the goodness of what should be versus the unacceptability of what is.
I hope that by somewhat illuminating the source and utility of emotions, maybe some of you can avoid the pitfalls of misused emotions.
And of course, emotions are much more than just Scorers of Imagined Futures. Love and attraction and parental love and visceral disgust all have deep biological keystones of causality beyond our imagining hypotheticals. But I do think what I have described is a very large and important part of what emotions are.
A Note On Grief
I desperately do not want my explanation of emotions to trivialize what they are. I am trying to show how important and key to the human experience emotions are…I am not reducing them to an algorithm.
That is especially true of grief. Grief is not a calculation. It is not a curiosity. Grief is not abstract at all to those enduring it. In some cases, grief feels like all there is. Grief is reality. That is very, very true.
I have heard grief described as the sharp pain like when you push your tongue into the socket of a tooth that was just knocked out. Your tongue touches a nerve (literally). I think this analogy to grief is not far from the truth. When someone important has been in our life for a time, our brain creates circuits that I think are dedicated to interacting with that person. How to joke with them, how they like to be hugged, memories of how they smile or how they smell…our soul writes that person and our relationship with them into our brain at the most fundamental levels.
And then they are gone. We pass a coffee shop where we met with them every third Wednesday of the month. Our brain fires up the circuit, and we imagine what we would say as they walked in and sat down with us. But then this is ripped away as we realize that that won’t happen again. The pleasure of imagining that future is replaced with the wrenching horror that this part of us, the part that was them in our mind and soul, won’t be giving pleasure anymore. I think this is a big part of the physical part of grief.
Neuronal circuits fail and scream when souls are ripped apart.
But eventually those circuits heal and become golden. The wailing grief becomes a warm smile as time goes on, always tinged with sadness, but increasingly rewired to becomes an honored memory instead of an active participant.
Above I talked about how emotions can become misused and fail us. Grief is not that. I think this is how we are supposed to deal with loss…to memorialize people in such a deep way that we ourselves are rewritten.
Their lives are written in our emotions.
Harnessing The Toolset
So I would encourage you to use this interpretation of what emotions are (in large part).2
Knowing more about their purpose and how they work doesn't cheapen them. Emotions are not biological algorithms. They are a core of who you are and help you become what you are to be next. But they are also a toolset.
So do your best to use that toolset instead of letting it use you when important decisions arise.
But also, be sure to let your emotions run free at times. That emotional calculator, tended properly, can be uniquely logical in ways deeper than we would think.
In case you are reading in a place without them, Snickers is a chocolate, nougat, caramel, and peanuts candy bar, and Starburst is basically hard fruit taffy. Both are fantastic, but they are pretty different.
Emotions are obviously more complex and varied than what’s encapsulated in this theory, and they come from more sources than what I have described. But I do think that this theory describes a large portion of what emotions fundamentally are.