A Creature Without Emotions 2.0: A Thought Experiment
By: Peter Lang
Tags: New York, Science, Emotions

Imagine a creature or some kind of unusual animal without any emotional life. Could such a being survive in the everyday world?

The Harvard philosopher, Nelson Goodman, once remarked that we probably rely more on feelings in our everyday lives than arid and cold cognition. Indeed, much of everyday thought is bound up with our fluctuating emotional lives. For instance, as some clinicians are fond to point out, strong emotional arousal has a tendency to significantly narrow our range of attention. Attention itself is a conscious process in which we selectively focus our mind-brain-body on one thing while we ignore other things, divide our attention among several things or sustain our attention on a single thing over an extended duration of time. What we focus our minds on and what we think about are highly determined by our level of emotional arousal as well as the range and kinds of emotional states we have experienced in the past.

Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, suggests that bodily signals — visceral sensation emanating from our abdominal area as well as bodily sensations arising from other parts of the body — modify the way the brain handles information and this is accomplished primarily through use of our prefrontal cortices in the thinking part of our brains. Because they lack these bodily signals or “somatic markers,” patients with damage to the frontal lobes are unable to even anticipate the future. That is, they are unable to predict future events, such as make simple, ordinary choices in everyday life, because they possess no biasing somatic state to rely on in decision-making.

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

Imagine yourself standing in a buffet line and having to decide between a piece of chocolate cake and a piece of apple pie. How does one typically make this type of decision? Certainly, there is no logical choice between the two if they are essentially the same price or calories. That is, there is no logical calculus that one can apply to arrive at deciding whether one option or another is preferable. That’s because we typically make choices based on our preferences, and our preferences are closely aligned with our pleasurable or non-pleasurable experiences in past encounters. We choose the chocolate cake because of the extraordinary memories we experienced of its exuberant sweetness, notes of cheery and almond, and the dark, rich flavors underneath — or something similar. The sensual joy of a gourmand is what prepared us for this experience not a series of logical steps in deductive thought.

It would appear, then, that a creature without emotions would thus be helpless in the most mundane of everyday tasks. Captain Spock of Star Trek fame is a convenient dramatic fiction not a character that has any rational basis in science or real life. Just like children that fail to survive because of a lack of ability to perceive and respond to pain (commonly referred to as “congenital analgesia” denoting a class of sensory neuropathies), our fictional Spock, bereft of the ability to perceive and respond to emotions in himself and others, would be unable to make even the simplest of everyday decisions — often to avoid harm — or form enduring relationships with caregivers and others that are essential for survival.

Q.E.D.: “Spock” is a dramatic fiction. Which again brings me to the main point of this short intellectual dalliance. Never take seriously anything you watch in a Hollywood sci-fi flic or TV show.