Maybe I am just really not the target audience of this post—but I did not find this very helpful.
I (and again I might normal minding here) am not surprised that Confusion, or Anger, or Fear make sense and are useful. When I have wanted to discard emotions this was not what I meant.
Rather, what doesn’t make sense is the biological feedback mechanisms of some specific emotions.
Anxiety is a good intuition pump. It makes me nervous and sweaty and kinda panicked. I forget things I’d otherwise remember, I stutter and look at the floor. You’re totally right that Anxiety fires when we care about things—but I know that I care about this thing already—the Anxiety just makes me way more likely to fail.
I would much prefer to live a life without those effects—I would be much better at interviews, dating, public speaking, etc. Literally everything I care about is directly undercut by the effects of Anxiety.
Similarly, I would prefer to live without the biological effects of Anger—when someone says something snide about me in a meeting I want to respond with something smart and professional (which I do to ~ everything else people say in meetings) - but instead the flash of Anger means I have to go silent and suppress the desire to say something stupid and unprofessional.
To generalize I often feel like specific emotions hijack my body against my own interests. These emotions are responding to things I am already very well aware of and make accomplishing my goals difficult.
My guess would be that this hijacking is a leftover from our mammalian evolution. The brain flooding the body with chemicals in specific situations to force a fast and extreme response makes a lot of sense if you’re a prey animal.
But my guess would be that these responses ~ never made sense for humans. I don’t imagine that sweaty palms while you’re stalking a Mammoth would actually help, or that doing the equivalent of something stupid and unprofessional when your social superior slights that you missed your spear throw because of said sweaty palms would improve your standing in the group.
I think it might be reasonable to distinguish the physiological reactions of emotions from the felt-sense of the emotions themselves; some biological reactions from emotions are probably leftover evolutionary traits from pre-homo-sapiens.
But I think you’re presuming too much by taking note of how inconvenient the physical symptoms are in modern contexts versus past ones. If being anxious->slippery palms->worse spear throws were really that detrimental to hunting, shouldn’t we expect it would have been selected against?
Notice your confusion, ask the next question: do sweaty palms make it harder to throw spears, or other natural objects? Smooth, artificially man made objects, yes. But porous objects like rocks and wood, quite the opposite! If you need to throw a spear or climb a tree, turns out dry hands are worse than slightly damp ones!
Is this sufficient justification for why our palms getting sweaty when anxious is a good thing? Maybe not. Maybe it’s a just-so story that is true for one particular instance or scenario but false for all the other times people get anxious and have sweaty palms. Certainly if your hands get too sweaty this might wrap back around to making things worse.
But I think you presume too much if you take for granted that the biological reactions of emotions are were not advantageous for the environment and situations we evolved in. Saying that you wish you didn’t have them now is reasonable, but I don’t think we should take for granted that we can always select out the unhelpful biological effects without losing something helpful in the process.
You’re totally right that Anxiety fires when we care about things—but I know that I care about this thing already—the Anxiety just makes me way more likely to fail.
I’m curious what you mean by you “know” you care about the thing already. Do you know this because of another emotion, or because of something else entirely? Is this the case for everything you care about that might go wrong?
Maybe I am just really not the target audience of this post—but I did not find this very helpful.
I (and again I might normal minding here) am not surprised that Confusion, or Anger, or Fear make sense and are useful. When I have wanted to discard emotions this was not what I meant.
Rather, what doesn’t make sense is the biological feedback mechanisms of some specific emotions.
Anxiety is a good intuition pump. It makes me nervous and sweaty and kinda panicked. I forget things I’d otherwise remember, I stutter and look at the floor. You’re totally right that Anxiety fires when we care about things—but I know that I care about this thing already—the Anxiety just makes me way more likely to fail.
I would much prefer to live a life without those effects—I would be much better at interviews, dating, public speaking, etc. Literally everything I care about is directly undercut by the effects of Anxiety.
Similarly, I would prefer to live without the biological effects of Anger—when someone says something snide about me in a meeting I want to respond with something smart and professional (which I do to ~ everything else people say in meetings) - but instead the flash of Anger means I have to go silent and suppress the desire to say something stupid and unprofessional.
To generalize I often feel like specific emotions hijack my body against my own interests. These emotions are responding to things I am already very well aware of and make accomplishing my goals difficult.
My guess would be that this hijacking is a leftover from our mammalian evolution. The brain flooding the body with chemicals in specific situations to force a fast and extreme response makes a lot of sense if you’re a prey animal.
But my guess would be that these responses ~ never made sense for humans. I don’t imagine that sweaty palms while you’re stalking a Mammoth would actually help, or that doing the equivalent of something stupid and unprofessional when your social superior slights that you missed your spear throw because of said sweaty palms would improve your standing in the group.
I think it might be reasonable to distinguish the physiological reactions of emotions from the felt-sense of the emotions themselves; some biological reactions from emotions are probably leftover evolutionary traits from pre-homo-sapiens.
But I think you’re presuming too much by taking note of how inconvenient the physical symptoms are in modern contexts versus past ones. If being anxious->slippery palms->worse spear throws were really that detrimental to hunting, shouldn’t we expect it would have been selected against?
Notice your confusion, ask the next question: do sweaty palms make it harder to throw spears, or other natural objects? Smooth, artificially man made objects, yes. But porous objects like rocks and wood, quite the opposite! If you need to throw a spear or climb a tree, turns out dry hands are worse than slightly damp ones!
Is this sufficient justification for why our palms getting sweaty when anxious is a good thing? Maybe not. Maybe it’s a just-so story that is true for one particular instance or scenario but false for all the other times people get anxious and have sweaty palms. Certainly if your hands get too sweaty this might wrap back around to making things worse.
But I think you presume too much if you take for granted that the biological reactions of emotions are were not advantageous for the environment and situations we evolved in. Saying that you wish you didn’t have them now is reasonable, but I don’t think we should take for granted that we can always select out the unhelpful biological effects without losing something helpful in the process.
I’m curious what you mean by you “know” you care about the thing already. Do you know this because of another emotion, or because of something else entirely? Is this the case for everything you care about that might go wrong?