Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
|
Emotion as Homeostasis The US psychologist Ross
Buckstudied the advantage of
emotions in communication between humans. Communication of emotions is a biologically
shared signal system. It was created over millions of years through the
evolutionary process and it is part of every human being. It means that it is
very easy to communicate an emotion: we immediately recognize the meaning of
another human's emotion. On the contrary, communicating a theorem is not easy
at all, and often requires special skills.
Emotions have the important
function of speeding up communication of crucial information among members of
the same species. If emotion is, ultimately, a
reaction to a situation in the environment, it can be assumed to be a
"measure" relative to that situation, and what is communicated is
precisely that measure. But a measure of what? Buckthinks that emotions always
originate from motives that must be satisfied: the emotion is a measure of how
far they have been satisfied. For
example, fear is a measure of safety. A more appropriate way of
referring to adaptation is "homeostasis", which is the process of
searching for a balance. If something changes in the environment, all organisms
that depend on that environment will somehow react to recreate the equilibrium
they need to survive. This process of continuous search for equilibrium is
called "homeostasis". Buckargues that the ultimate
function of emotions is homeostasis. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Emotion" | Back to the index of all chapters |
| 
| 
| 
|
