Franktalk wrote:But why did evolution make these emotions. To what benefit to the species?
Neurons exist for the benefit of all the other cells in the body. Neurons are not essential for the basic life process, as all those living creatures that have no neurons at all easily demonstrate. But in complicated creatures with many cells, neurons assist the multicellular body proper with the management of life. That is the purpose of neurons and the purpose of the brains they constitute.
Even in modest brains, made of networks of neurons arranged as ganglia, neurons assist other cells in the body. They do so by receiving signals from body cells and either promoting the release of chemical molecules (as they do with a hormone secreted by an endocrine cell that reaches body cells and changes their function) or by making movements happen (as when neurons excite muscle fibers and make them contract). In the elaborate brains of complex creatures, however, networks of neurons eventually come to mimic the structure of parts of the body to which they belong. They end up representing the state of the body, literally mapping the body for which they work and constituting a sort of virtual surrogate of it, a neural double.
In brief, neurons are about the body, and this "aboutness," this relentless pointing to the body, is the defining trait of neurons, neuron circuits, and brains. Curiously the fact that neurons and brains are about the body also suggests how the external world would get mapped in the brain and mind. When the brain maps the world external to the body, it does so thanks to the mediation of the body. When the body interacts with its environment, changes occur in the body's sensory organs, such as the eyes, ears, and skin; the brain maps those changes, and thus the world outside the body indirectly acquires some form of representation within the brain.
Life requires the transformation of suitable nutrients into energy, and that, in turn, calls for the ability to solve several problems: finding the energy products, placing them inside the body, converting them into the universal currency of energy known as ATP, disposing of the waste, and using the energy for whatever the body needs to continue this same routine of finding the right stuff, incorporating it, and so forth.
The mechanics of life management are crucial because of its difficulty. Life is a precarious state, made possible only when a large number of conditions are met simultaneously within the body's interior. The amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide can vary only within a narrow range, as can the acidity of the bath in which chemical molecules of every sort can travel from cell to cell. The same applies to temperature; it also applies to the amount of fundamental nutrients in circulation - sugars, fats, proteins. We feel discomfort when the variations depart from the nice and narrow range, and we feel quite agitated if we go for a very long time without doing something about the situation. These mental states and behaviors are signs that the ironclad rules of life regulation are being disobeyed; they are prompts from the netherlands of nonconscious processing toward minded and conscious life, requesting us to find a reasonable solution for a situation that can no longer be managed by automatic, nonconscious devices.
The process of achieving the balanced state necessary for life is called homeostasis. At the level of gene networks the primitive of value would consist of an ordering of gene expressions that would result in the construction of "homeostatically competent" organisms.
A good part of those instructions must have consisted of constructing devices capable of conducting efficient life regulation. The newly assembled devices handled the distributions of rewards, the application of punishments, and the prediction of situations that an organism would face. In brief, gene instructions led to the construction of devices capable of executing what, in complex organisms like us, came to flourish as emotions, in the broad sense of the term.
Is homeostasis enough to guarantee survival? Not really, because attempting to correct homeostatic imbalances after they begin is inefficient and risky. Evolution took care of this problem by introducing devices that allow organisms to anticipate imbalances and that motivate them to explore environments likely to offer solutions.
Snippets from Self Comes to Mind - Antonio Damasio
Kolob’s set time is “one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest” (Abraham 3:4). I take this as a round number. - Gee
