emotions and decision making

[William Flynn Wallace]

How would human behaviour be more or less ethical and/or moral if the processes of decision making was conducted in the absence of emotional attachment?  from quora

Can’t be done. A man with a brain injury which detached the emotional center from the frontal cortex could not make a simple decision. Coffee? Could not decide.

So the question is moot: we simply cannot do it. You are assuming that all emotional things are irrational. Think of them as nonrational. Emotions makes perfectly good sense: we enjoy food, sex, beauty and so on. All great emotions.

Fear keeps us safe. Let’s hear it for fear! Of course any emotion can be bad. Too much lust could lead to rape. Too much fear leads to phobias and shyness. Too much enjoyment of food can lead to obesity, and so on for all emotions.

Be thankful for your emotions. Like anything else, they could lead you to bad decisions, but without them we are zombies who can make no decisions at all.

[Brent Allsop]

Right, unless something is joyful, there is no purpose to anything, right?

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[SR Ballard]

I don’t think that the most normal motivator for rape is lust (except perhaps date rape?), but rather power and control. 

SR Ballard

On Jun 29, 2021, at 10:33 AM, William Flynn Wallace <fooz...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Brent Allsop]

It could be configured that way, but you'd still need some pleasure, wired up to that having control, otherwise not? 

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[William Flynn Wallace]

It depends.  Power and control will be factors in a person who repeatedly rapes - lust more a factor in date rape, I think.  One black man who wrote a book on it (name escapes me), said he raped white women anally to make them more humiliated.  Even in date rape there is some control there.  Lust always there or no action.  bill w

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[Brent Allsop]

I think rewarding pleasures can be wired to anything.  I just look forward to the time when we can cut the puppet strings evolution has wired, so we can wire rewarding joys to what we want to do, instead.

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[William Flynn Wallace]

Huh?  I assume that what we want to do brings us pleasure.  It's the things we have to do that can be boring and joyless.  bill w

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[Brent Allsop]

As I was saying on HR Ballard's forked '“Lust” and sexual violence' thread, everyone is talking at the composite qualia level.  All these things are computationally bound elemental intrinsic qualities.

Evolution has wired taking out the garbage to be composed of disgusting smells and such, while evolution has wired sex to some very different set of elemental qualities.  Evolution wanted us to have sex.

There is no reason you couldn't simply reverse engineer these, and wire them to be the opposite of each other.  Couldn't a simple re-wiring result in taking out the garbage being orgasmic?

Wouldn't you agree that Dog's enjoyable knowledge of shit must be programmed to be something very different than the disquieting smells our brain represents knowledge of shit with, right?

I want to be able to do such reconfigurations, when I want to take out the garbage.

Again, it is important to differentiate reality and knowledge of reality.

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