From a neurological point of view, how are emotions experienced and why do they often feel so powerful? I can understand ‘happiness’ or ‘anger’ circuits of the brain firing in response to stimuli, but how does that translate in to the awareness of the experience? Why does ‘happy’ feel happy, why does ‘sad’ feel sad? Why doesn’t the emotional response feel similiar to when I tap my fingers on my arm, essentially just stimulated or not stimulated? Could a computer circuit set up similar to our brain actually feel these same emotions? Is self-awareness necessary to feel an emotion? Can a comatose person feel love/hate/greed even if unaware of them?
Seven difficult questions there, PM!
Emotion is, in an utterly oversimplistic sense, a chemical ‘moderator’ of what happens in these vastly complex arrangement of neurons called brains.
“Emotion circuits” is a little misleading since brains and electronic computers are radically different, but certain subcortices of the brain collectively called the limbic system certainly seem to play a strong part in emotion. (And that all vertebrates have one implies that they might have emotions similar to, if perhaps rather less “powerful” than, our own.)
Now, we can’t simply point to activity in eg. the amygdala and say “See? That’s what fear is”, any more than we could point to activity in a particular RAM domain in a computer’s video card and say “See? That’s Doom 3!”. I have outlined the hardware that is associated with emotion, but explaining precisely how “experience” arises from hardware is as tricky as explaining a computer game in terms of circuits.
“Why things feel the way they do” is the central question in exploring qualia (the plural of “quale”). A more easily answerable question, given emotion’s comparative complexity in terms of its physical nature, is perhaps “Why does the experience of yellow feel like that?”. Yellow is EM radiation of wavelength of around 580nm. The experience of yellow is what happens when 580nm radiation is input via sensory apparatus called an “eye” into a brain’s limbic, processing and memory system. The stimulus (including recalled memories) required for “happiness” is an altogether more general and intractable field of study, but the priciples are similar. Tapping your arm is clearly not enough of a stimulus, or it does not trigger memories associated with a “happy” response in the past, to cause happiness whenever you do it.
The limbic system developed over literally billions of years of evolution. Trying to combine electronic computers with chemical-based emotion seems to me a nigh-impossible task! (However, perhaps some other ‘moderator’ might approximate the influence of emotion.) Comatose patients essentially “hibernate”, with their limbic system slowing down to an incredibly low level of activity. As for “self-awareness”, well, perhaps sensory inputs being sorted into different levels of memory, moderated by chemical emotion, is all self-awareness is!
I think this is one of the fundamental questions of neurology and philosophy and psychology and probably a few other fields – how does the firing of billions of individual neurons generate a coherent consciousness that experiences the stimulation of area X as “intense pleasure” or the depletion of chemical Y as “depression”? And so forth.
And I see SentientMeat was working on a much better post while I was typing mine. I’d just like to say that I was about to mention qualia as well, and recommend the book Phantoms in the Brain for a good overview of this and similar points. But I accidentally hit the tab key as I was typing, and of course the space bar then clicked on “submit” for me. I’m just lucky it wasn’t in the middle of a sentence or word.
I also highly reccomend Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”.