Assume for a minute we could create two people, and insert them into society. One of these people would feel emotions, but be able to turn them off, a la Data. The other would be emotionally numb. What do we think would happen to these people.
Ah, such an interesting concept. It is my belief that a person who is not hindered by emotion will make far more logical decisions than those who do not. However, the bigger question is what would these people do? If they lack all emotions, what would motivate them? Would they care about anything? Would they desire anything? Such questions are of the utmost importance. I can not pretend to be able to answer them conclusively, so I shall let others discuss it and perhaps I will join the discussion later.
I’ve read that those who have suffered the sort of brain damage that leads to loss of emotion suffer from cognitive limitations as well.
I would concur; I find my moral facilities helpful when posing questions. And posing questions is germaine to understanding.
Strong emotions, of course, can be distracting.
It sems it isn’t so. I understand that people who suffered brain damages resulting in a state of emotionnal numbness are unable to operate properly. I don’t know to which extent such people lose emotions, but I gather they keep running in various troubles, and though perfectly aware that their behavior is harmful to them and conscious that they could change it, they keep acting foolishly.
So it seems that reason without emotion is a recipe for disaster…
I remember hearing that emotions are just the mind’s way of taking a shortcut around logic. In other words, emotions are usually appropriate reactions to something which can be logically established.
I.e., the September 11 bombings. You can sit there and logically calculate why the terrorists’ actions were wrong; I’d wager that a sufficient logical theory can be written about why it shouldn’t have been done. Or, you can consider that most Americans got pissed off, upset, and/or scared, and nobody really questioned that reaction.
Who knows if it is a valid one, but it seems that emotions assist memory. Emotive connections act as ‘cementers’ and/or ‘promtors’ for experiences and allow one to more easily recall and utilize memories of prior experiences. Thus the value of ritual (in addition to repetition).
'Course I could just be talking out of my a**.
There are all sorts of emotions and are they are all useful.
Even robots can’t work without them apparently. I don’t know what that means for Spock but all I know is if robots can’t feel fear they can’t detect danger and react accordingly, as it is with people. People also need them because morality is emotionally based. Children will become moral if they develop empathy for others rather than learn a set of rules. A reliable way of making sure a child does not develop psychopathic tendencies is to read them Oscar Wilde’s story The Happy Prince over and over again. It is a sad, sad story but without a doubt it will kickstart (or make stronger) a sense of empathy. Well, it’s what happened to me anyway and I make sure it happens to any kid I come into contact with.
Without emotions, how would give meaning to your life? Without meaning, why go on living?
Without emotions, how would you feel compassion for others? Without compassion, what would happen to ethics? Without ethics, how long before society would crumble? A robot can commit any atrocity.
Without emotions, how would you have a sense of self? Would you have intuition? Would you recognize beauty?
Reason’s a good thing – our reason, our logic, and our skills keep us alive. But I find our irrational side is what gives us our reasons to keep going, and gives us direction.
Life isn’t about just lasting a long time. For me, how you live it is a bit more important.
Arg. Remember, both of my hypothetical people are people. They feel pleasure and pain, and can reason. They simply have no emotional connection to anything. Let’s posit a sense of self-preservation, since they’d just wander into traffic without it.
Weighing in on the side of emotions being very useful. Our emotions developed over millennia as a useful survival tool. From simple pain avoidance, to the much more sophisticated emotions that we enjoy today (social pain avoidance?) they seem to me to be most defiantly pro-survival.
Arguably, in a society where being emotionless was the norm, it may be that the general trend would be more rational (better) decisions. That said, in this society, where we are all emotional to one degree or another, a being lacking emotions would be at a disadvantage.
I would suspect that they would miss many subtle emotional clues that would be problematic (how would they know when to mate? Or with whom?). This would lead to a host of problems. Doing poorly in job interviews and the like.
I have little experience in this area. Could you post some links where I might find out more about such a situation? In any case, it would seem that such people were not acting out of “reason.” For, if they were, they would not act foolishly, now would they. Quite the contrary. However, I wonder if someone without emotions would still desire. If desire were taken away, such a person would not function. Without goals, what would such a person do? So, the ideal might be the removal of all emotions, with certain desires remaining. Perhaps such a desire would be the survival of the community as a whole. This being the case, compassion would be an obstruction. Would it be compassionate to kill those who are taking away from a community without giving an equal amount back? In other words, those people who are simply draining resources, without really contributing to society. To kill such people would not be compassionate, but it would be a logical decision that would benefit the community.
Lacking all emotional connection is not the same thing as lacking emotion. And, ultimately, all our emotions are linked to survival traits and essential human functions. Even love, which is abstracted and romaticized ad nauseam, is a mechanism that clearly works well in establishing and preserving a cohesive social unit. Compassion and self-sacrifice appear to be hardwired in some species for the survival of the whole (at the potential risk of the part).
Self-preservation seems to me more of an instinct than emotion, but when your safety is threatened you feel fear. Emotions play an important role in the physical, not necessarily just the mental, world. As such I do not think it is possible to separate emotion from logic the way some TV shows do!
Said that there are disorders and conditions documented in the realms of psychology and neuroscience that may be what you are looking for.
Depersonalization is one I hadn’t looked into before. From http://minet.org/Documents/research.1990.castillo (this is quite an interesting little piece, as it deals with meditation)
Loss of emotions may also happen as a result of traumatic brain injury, particularly in children. Check out TBI (traumatic brain injury) or closed head injuries for more.
Schizophrenia (and such delusional and dissociative disorders) sometimes causes loss of emotions, in which case the patient does not turn into Data or Spock, but instead responds inappropriately to stimuli (such as bursting into tears during a happy event) or simply becomes indifferent to everything around him.
Plenty more cases to look at. I’d like to note though that a human without emotions is a sorry creature indeed. Can you imagine being deprived of all emotions including the ones we take for granted, such as curiosity? What you would have is a human who has lost all motivation and who is unable to interact with other humans. In other words, complete apathy. In fact, since apathy is another symptom of schizophrenia, you may be interested in looking at some schizophrenia case histories.
Well, without emotions, what would a person want from life? Self-Preservation has already been mentioned, and I think we can make that the number 1 goal. As the OP says they can experience pleasure and pain, and other purely ‘physical’ sensations, I would say goal 2 would be maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain.
Other people’s feelings would obviously not enter into it, as they would have no empathy/sympathy. Therefore we are left with someone who will ruthlessly go after anything that could possibly provide pleasure, providing there was a mininal risk of pain or death.
The case where emotions can be turned off is different… If this person switches into ‘vulcan’ mode, would he want to switch back? What reason would a non-emotional being have for wanting to be emotional? Also, if he did switch back, would he then feel bad (or good) about things he had done while ‘off’? Would the fact that he knows he will feel bad affect his actions while his emotions are ‘off’? In that case, wouldn’t he be pretty much the same as anyone else?
I had a point, but I’m no longer sure what it was - if anyone works it out, please let me know!
Stop changing the question in mid-OP!
Even if you include a desire for Self Preservation… WHY? Why would they want to survive? What logical reason would they have for living? Before you say, “Pleasure.” I continue to…
Without emotions, you have suggested that pleasure/avoidance of pain would be a desire. Yet without emotions, why would you want them? It would be merely another sensation, indicating clinical, biological change. Assuming you hardwired the Survival instinct, then they might act on these external pressures, but with no real understanding of what it meant.
Continuing, why would you keep doing anything but eating, working, and sleeping without emotions?
And, in any case, why would you go live like this? It could not possibly grant you more personal fulfillment or a better life.
Two minutes ago, I just ate a piece of key lime pie. I enjoyed the pie. If the oppertunity comes up to have pie again, I will do so, unless cheesecake is present. No emotions necessary. Also, I stipulate that my emotionless people can reason. I.E. They won’t feel bad about devouring the census man’s liver with fava beans, but they wouldn’t, because that would be dangerous, and thus contrary to survival instinct.
At the core, The question I’m asking is, “Can reason be substituted for emotion in a member of society and still let them function?”
Two minutes ago, I just ate a piece of key lime pie. I enjoyed the pie. If the oppertunity comes up to have pie again, I will do so, unless cheesecake is present. No emotions necessary. Also, I stipulate that my emotionless people can reason. I.E. They won’t feel bad about devouring the census man’s liver with fava beans, but they wouldn’t, because that would be dangerous, and thus contrary to survival instinct.
At the core, The question I’m asking is, “Can reason be substituted for emotion in a member of society and still let them function?”
The emotionally numb one, if absolutely and completely so, will be unable to reach any conclusions about anything whatsoever, despite having data available. The intuitive little leap of “yes, this means such-and-such” or “aha, I see a pattern” is dependent upon emotion.
In fact, the emotionally numb one, being unable to recognize patterns or draw conclusions from data, will be therefore unable to recognize data, and will be no more able to understand what anything means than my computer is able to comprehend the essays and theory papers saved by my word processor.
Emotions are the fundament of cognition. No emotions, no cognitions.
I’ve no experience in this area. I gathered these informations from a TV report (filmed in the US) and some articles in more serious reviews (french…so even if I was willing to search for these articles and still have them, it wouldn’t help if you don’t read french). And I don’t intend to make a web search on this topic, since I’ve no point to make and no intend to convince anybody. I know what I read, so I personnally don’t need to search for cites, and if you’re interested in this topic you can do that as easily as I could. It’s not a reproach, I only have no interest in making this research.
So strong is the power of images that I remember much better the content on the TV footage than the content of the articles. The woman in the report basically pissed off everybody around her (husband, family, friends, etc…) because she couldn’t care less about their feelings. She also dramatically changed her behavior, becoming extremely assertive. She had many issues but didn’t seem to really mind, and even seemed to feel content of the changes (That’s why I said I didn’t know to which extent one lose his emotions in such a case, since to be content you need some level of emotion. Also, she had kept her sexual drive)
Though on the other hand I don’t clearly remember the examples studied in the articles advancing the idea that emotions are necessary to operate properly, they were much more dramatic for the victims. They would lose their jobs, their families, everything…Basically they couldn’t care less about anything. Like going to work, for instance. The ultimate consequences of their acts (eventually losing their job and income, for instance) were clear in their mind, but they just didn’t care about them .
It makes a lot of sense to me, since even if you know you’re going to lose your job, but don’t feel a fear of becoming homeless, don’t feel shame because you’re unemployed, don’t feel ambition about your social status, etc…(or strongly reduced level of these feelings), why would you act? One need some emotion to be somewhat motivated. Imagine the following exchange :
-You know, i’m going to lose my job next month…
-And how will you pay your rent?
-*I won’t pay it *
-But you’ll be homeless!
-Sure I will
-People will dispise you
-Probably. People often are usually like that
-You’ll be cold and hungry!!!
-That’s very likely
-And what do you intend to do to avoid that?
-Nothing. Why should I?
That’s sounds perfectly rational though unemotional to me…
AHunter3: Cite? My computer can process data pretty well, and it is unemotional.
clairobscur: we stipulated the ability to feel pleasure and pain, and the desire for self-preservation. My EP would keep his/her job, at the cost of short-term unhappiness, because he/she could judge that stable income == more metaphorical key lime pie. Conversely, he/she would dump his/her job of 20 years in a hot minute if a better one came along.
“If the oppertunity comes up to have pie again, I will do so, unless cheesecake is present. No emotions necessary. Also, I stipulate that my emotionless people can reason.”
OK, fine, we’ll even assume for a moment that you do. Congratulations, you’ve become a Utilitarian robot. There is no point in your life. Moreover, anything which now requires any emtional input has become meaningless. You won’t enjoy anything which is not a physcally pleasing sensation. In other words, no movies, fiction books, music.
You are an eating/sex machine. If that’s your goal in life, go ahead. I won’t feel much shame either when I put you out of my misery as an abomination upon the earth and a mortal insult to God.