My stance towards emotions is to treat them as abstract “sensory organs” – because that’s what they are, in a fairly real sense. Much like the inputs coming from the standard sensory organs, you can’t always blindly trust the data coming from them. Something which looks like a cat at a glance may not be a cat, and a context in which anger seems justified may not actually be a context in which anger is justified. So it’s a useful input to take into account, but you also have to have a model of those sensory organs’ flaws and the perceptual illusions they’re prone to.
(Staring at a bright lamp for a while and then looking away would overlay a visual artefact onto your vision that doesn’t correspond to anything in reality, and if someone shines a narrow flashlight in your eye, you might end up under the impression someone threw a flashbang into the room. Similarly, the “emotional” sensory organs can end up reporting completely inaccurate information in response to some stimuli.)
Another frame is to treat emotions as heuristics – again, because that’s largely what they are. And much like any other rule-of-thumbs, they’re sometimes inapplicable or produce incorrect results, so one must build a model regarding how and when they work, and be careful regarding trusting them.
The “semantic claims” frame in this post is also very useful, though, and indeed makes some statements about emotions easier to express than in the sensory-organs or heuristics frames. Kudos!
My stance towards emotions is to treat them as abstract “sensory organs” – because that’s what they are, in a fairly real sense. Much like the inputs coming from the standard sensory organs, you can’t always blindly trust the data coming from them. Something which looks like a cat at a glance may not be a cat, and a context in which anger seems justified may not actually be a context in which anger is justified. So it’s a useful input to take into account, but you also have to have a model of those sensory organs’ flaws and the perceptual illusions they’re prone to.
(Staring at a bright lamp for a while and then looking away would overlay a visual artefact onto your vision that doesn’t correspond to anything in reality, and if someone shines a narrow flashlight in your eye, you might end up under the impression someone threw a flashbang into the room. Similarly, the “emotional” sensory organs can end up reporting completely inaccurate information in response to some stimuli.)
Another frame is to treat emotions as heuristics – again, because that’s largely what they are. And much like any other rule-of-thumbs, they’re sometimes inapplicable or produce incorrect results, so one must build a model regarding how and when they work, and be careful regarding trusting them.
The “semantic claims” frame in this post is also very useful, though, and indeed makes some statements about emotions easier to express than in the sensory-organs or heuristics frames. Kudos!