Home
Forums
New posts
Contact Us
What's new
New posts
New media
New media comments
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Search All
Members
Current visitors
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
New posts
Contact Us
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Forums
Really good
Life
United by feelings
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="cheryl" data-source="post: 1387" data-attributes="member: 1"><p><a href="https://aeon.co/essays/human-culture-and-cognition-evolved-through-the-emotions" target="_blank"><strong>United by feelings - Aeon</strong></a></p><p></p><p>Charles Darwin closed his <em>On the</em> <em>Origin of Species</em> (1870) with a provocative promise that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. In his later books <em>The Descent of Man</em> (1871) and <em>The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals</em> (1872), Darwin shed some of that promised light, especially on the evolved emotional and cognitive capacities that humans shared with other mammals. In one scandalous passage, he demonstrated that four ‘defining’ characteristics of <em>Homo sapiens</em> – tool use, language, aesthetic sensitivity and religion – are all present, if rudimentary, in nonhuman animals. Even morality, he argued, arose through natural selection. Altruistic self-sacrifice might not give the individual a survival advantage, but, he wrote:</p><p></p><p>Yet Darwin’s revolutionary understanding of the evolved nature of human emotions has been neglected since. When scientists turned again to the mind a century later, the computer was the model that both sparked the cognitive sciences revolution and served as its exclusive investigative tool. The computational <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer" target="_blank">model</a> of the mind has been very powerful, but it has no way (and no need) to capture the biological ingredient of motivational feeling-states, and has been unconcerned with the evolved substrate to such processes. Even when evolutionary psychology rose to prominence in the 1990s, it did so by ignoring the actual evolved physiology and behaviour of brain and body. Rather, it set out on a search for computational modules that had placed human behaviour in some largely mythical Pleistocene. Indeed, contemporary moral psychology and its philosophical counterpart often continue this modular approach, assuming the existence of innate normative switches in the human mind and discounting the emotional nature of ethical actions.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="cheryl, post: 1387, member: 1"] [URL='https://aeon.co/essays/human-culture-and-cognition-evolved-through-the-emotions'][B]United by feelings - Aeon[/B][/URL] Charles Darwin closed his [I]On the[/I] [I]Origin of Species[/I] (1870) with a provocative promise that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. In his later books [I]The Descent of Man[/I] (1871) and [I]The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals[/I] (1872), Darwin shed some of that promised light, especially on the evolved emotional and cognitive capacities that humans shared with other mammals. In one scandalous passage, he demonstrated that four ‘defining’ characteristics of [I]Homo sapiens[/I] – tool use, language, aesthetic sensitivity and religion – are all present, if rudimentary, in nonhuman animals. Even morality, he argued, arose through natural selection. Altruistic self-sacrifice might not give the individual a survival advantage, but, he wrote: Yet Darwin’s revolutionary understanding of the evolved nature of human emotions has been neglected since. When scientists turned again to the mind a century later, the computer was the model that both sparked the cognitive sciences revolution and served as its exclusive investigative tool. The computational [URL='https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer']model[/URL] of the mind has been very powerful, but it has no way (and no need) to capture the biological ingredient of motivational feeling-states, and has been unconcerned with the evolved substrate to such processes. Even when evolutionary psychology rose to prominence in the 1990s, it did so by ignoring the actual evolved physiology and behaviour of brain and body. Rather, it set out on a search for computational modules that had placed human behaviour in some largely mythical Pleistocene. Indeed, contemporary moral psychology and its philosophical counterpart often continue this modular approach, assuming the existence of innate normative switches in the human mind and discounting the emotional nature of ethical actions. [/QUOTE]
Verification
Post reply
Forums
Really good
Life
United by feelings
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
Accept
Learn more…
Top