Notes on 《How the Mind Works》Ch.6 —— Hotheads

In this chapter Steven presents a distinctly unromantic theory of the emotions which combines the computational theory of mind with the modern theory of evolution. He demonstrates that the emotions are adaptations, well-engineered software modules that work in harmony with the intellect and are indispensable to the functioning of the whole mind. Via reverse-engineering he also proves emotions are designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.

Emotion v.s. Intellect

• The emotions come from nature and live in the body. They are hot, irrational impulses and intuitions, which follow the imperatives of biology.
• The intellect comes from civilization and lives in the mind. It is a cool deliberator that follows the interests of self and society by keeping the emotions in check.

The triune brain theory proposed by Paul Mac Lean: the human cerebrum is an evolutionary palimpsest of three layers.

1. Reptilian Brain/the basal ganglia: the seat of the primitive and selfish emotions driving the "Four Fs": feeding, fighting, fleeing, and sexual behavior.
2. Primitive Mammalian Brain/the limbic system: dedicated to the kinder, gentler, social emotions, like those behind parenting.
3. Modern Mammalian Brain/the neocortex: houses the intellect.

Why the triune theory is incorrect:

• The forces of evolution do not just heap layers on an unchanged foundation: Though our bodies carry vestiges of the past, they have been modified to fit features of the human lifestyle.
• The evidence shows the emotions are easy to reprogram.
• The human cerebral cortex does not ride piggyback on an ancient limbic system, or serve as the terminus of a processing stream beginning there.The systems work in tandem, integrated by many two-way connections.

The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain's highest-level goals. Each human emotion mobilizes the mind and body to meet one of the challenges of living and reproducing in the cognitive niche.

Disgust:

• The psychology of disgust obeys the two laws:the law of contagion and the law of similarity.
• Disgust is an adaptation that deterred our ancestors from eating dangerous animal stuff.
• Disgust is intuitive microbiology, so we disgust things contaminate everythings they touch.
• Disgust insects and small creatures: From optimal foraging theory point of view, animals allocate their time to maximize the rate of nutrients they consume. Thus insects are absent from the diets of cultures. Since in the minds of eaters, whatever is not permitted is forbidden, those cultures find them disgusting.
• The food taboos are weapons to keep potential defectors in.

Fear:

• Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us.
• Fears do change with experience.
• Fears can be easily conditioned only when the animal is evolutionarily prepared to make the association.

Happiness:

• The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness.
• People are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off.
• People adapt to their circumstances. The baseline that people adapt to, on average, is not misery but satisfaction.
• Losses are more keenly felt than equivalent gains.

Delay of gratification:

• Future discounting: prefer a large late reward to a small early one. Discounting the future (good things now and better things later) is part of the logic of choice for any agent that lives longer than an instant. Whether going for the quick reward insteat of a distant payoff depends on:
• How important the short-term gratification is to you now.
• How likely you are to get for the distant payoff and how big this payoff is.
• How long you expect to live
• Myopic discounting: flip our preference from choosing a large late reward to a small early one as time passes and both rewards draw nearer.

Social Emotions:

• Selfish Gene theory's explanation:
• Natural selection selects selfish replicators. It is gene not body replicate, and that means that genes not bodies should be selfish.
• The way for a gene to do that in an animal with a brain is to wire the brain so that the animal's pleasures and pains cause it to act in ways that lead to more copies of the gene.
• Kin selection: Altruism evolves because the altruist is related to the beneficiary so the altruism-causing gene benefits itself. It has another name -- love.
• The essence of love is feeling pleasure in another's well-being and pain in its harm.The sacrifices made for love are modulated by:
• The degree of relatedness: the closer, the more sacrifications.
• The expected reproductive life of the beneficiary: the longer the beneficiary live, the more sacrifications.
• the beneficiary's own feelings of love: you help people who enjoy helping you and helping your relatives
• Do not misstate the "Selfish gene" theory:
• People's genes are not their true self
• The metaphorical motives of people's genes are not the real, deepest, truest, unconscious motives of the persons.
  
• Love, compassion, and empathy are invisible fibers that connect genes in different bodies.

The moral emotions are designed by natural selection to further the long-term interests of individuals and ultimately their genes.

• The demands of reciprocal altruism are probably the source of many human emotions. Collectively they make up a large part of the moral sense.
• The minimal equipment is a cheater-detector and a tit-for-tat strategy that begrudges a gross cheater further help.
• Liking is the emotion that initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership.
• Anger protects a person whose niceness has left her vulnerable to being cheated.
• Gratitude calibrates the desire to reciprocate according to the costs and benefits of the original act.
• Sympathy, the desire to help those in need, may be an emotion for earning gratitude.
• Guilt can rack a cheater who is in danger of being found out.
• Righteous anger, and the attendant thirst for redress or vengeance, is a credible deterrent if it is uncontrollable and unresponsive to the deterrer's costs.
• Romantic love is a emotion that was not triggered by your objective mate-value and so will
  not be alienated by someone with greater mate-value; An emotion that the person did not decide to have, and so cannot decide not to have. An emotion that is guaranteed not to be a sham because it has physiological costs like tachycardia, insomnia, and anorexia.
  
• Grief are powerful reminders to protect and cherish a loved one in the face of myriad other demands on one's time and thoughts.
• Self-deception makes us feel right when we are wrong and emboldens us to fight when we ought to surrender.

Facial Expressions:

• Facial expressions need to be broadcasted to show the passionate emotions which are guarantors of threats and promises.
• Facial expressions are useful since they are hard to fake: Emotions are so intimately tied to the body, because the major human emotions seem to have grown out of evolutionary precursors, each of which engaged a suite of involuntary physiological responses.