Why We Feel Helix Books Mobi ☆ 220 pages Download ↠ Danpashley

Book Why We Feel Helix Books

Why We Feel Helix Books Mobi ☆ 220 pages Download ↠ Danpashley ☆ ➷ [Reading] ➹ Why We Feel Helix Books By Victor S. Johnston ➬ – Danpashley.co.uk Biopsychologist Victor Johnston explores the origins of human emotions Drawing on computer science neurobiology and evolutionary pF reality what we see hear smell and feel is not an accurate representation of the world around us; rather our feelings are illusions shaped by millions of years of evolutio The book repeats what has been said before about emotions and evolutionary theory kin selection reciprocal altruism tit for tat and prisoner's dilemma the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness traits evolved in response to particular situations in the evolutionary environment There is some new information on beauty and a computer program FacePrints that I had not seen before The author confuses me on what he means by feelings He euates them with emotions our inner private feelings emotions that leads a reader to wonder why there's a need for two terms to describe the same thing particularly when others eg Demasio make an important distinction between the two The author also says that In addition to emotions a second category of inner feelings are elicited by sensory inputs that he calls affects so now the reader has emotions that may not be the same thing as feelings which in turn he refers to as affects Then he calls all feelings emotions as well as affects adding that all feelings come in hedonic tones good and bad feelings about things From hedonic the discussion of feelings gets challenging For example Johnston writes that our feelings act like active filters or what I call discriminant hedonic amplifiers that define and exaggerate the reproductive conseuences of environmental or social events associated with relatively minor fluctuations in reproductive potential Johnston repeats the or less standard identification of primary social emotions that he then introduces as just simply primary emotions happiness sadness anger fear disgust and surprise which triggers the uestion about whether these are or are not social It's a fair uestion Presumably we can be happy for non social reasons we have food and we get surprised when we meet an animal coming around the corner The author says we got these primary emotions because of commonly occuring events in our evolutionary past but happiness sadness etc are or less general states of being and it's natural to wonder how these developed by common occuring specific? events as the author suggests The author says that children are happy when they get what they want but that begs the deeper uestion about what it is that they want and why do they want such things For example in his discussion of secondary social emotions which Johnston defines as guilt pride and envy but later he adds embarassment shame and pride why does a child care about what others think? Darwin suggests this is the evolutionary need to be part of the tribal group If so is that need an emotion? The author echos what other evolutionary theorists believe that every feature of our body exists because of its survival value On the uestion of why our faces are as they are Johnston says that we have large bushy eyebrows set close to the eye on a protruding brow ridge because it provides an effective method for excluding sweat from the eye sockets as well as providing protection from an overhead sun Is it really true that many of our fellow primates died because they did not have large busy eyebrows? The best line in this book was his footnote in the back when he writes that Without feelings affects and emotions the world around us is a meaningless conglomerate of energymatter I also liked his comment in the preface that The human brain did not evolve to accurately represent the world around us; it evolved only to enhance the survival of our genes I like the author's opening discussion that is critical of dry cognitive science human brain as a general purpose computer and wet cognitive science that the conscious attributes of mind like sensations and feelings are a product of the physical and chemical organization of the brain The problem with the former Johnston argues is that it does not take into account emotionsfeelingsaffects The problem with the latter is that it does not develop and explain how such feelings came about The author comes at his subject from the perspective of evolutionary functionalism the survival function that our emotions played in the past That is a valuable perspective as long as one is open to the possibility that even this approach has shortcomings