From: nic nott (gnicgnostic@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Sun Jun 08 2003 - 21:51:38 BST
dmb
> Its interesting to note that emotional trauma in the early stages can
> forever disrupt or impede the higher cognitive functions. Its not a
> developmental stage we can skip or avoid, at least not without paying a big
> price. Feelings, wishes and emotions certainly involve conitive functions,
> and they are an essential part of the overall maturation process. But they
> are of of different sort than intellect.
sam
Can you expand on that last sentence?
> I guess it depends on what, exactly, the word "emotion" means to you. But in
> the normal sense of the word, they are something that adults learn to
> control and manage for higher purposes. Not that we can avoid them, we just
> learn how to better deal with them. I'm sure you know that teaching such
> control a huge part of raising children. As a adults we can sort out our
> feelings as a means of self-examination. They stay with us and guide us even
> in our mature lives, but that doesn't mean they're intellectual level
> values. It just means that intellectuals have feelings too.
Which seems to me that you are, in a much more sophisticated way, arguing that emotions are
impediments to cognitive functioning. Which is what I'm objecting to. To reassure me that you're not
(if you want to) why don't you spell out how and why you see emotions as having a cognitive role?
Emotions could be described as an instinctive blanket response to a specific problem . For instance you might have a negative emotional response to spiders because evolution has shown that some spiders are dangerous and so instilled a fear of all spiders . However when we have become more intellectually evolved we learn to discriminate between which spiders are dangerous and which are not . And so the emotional response becomes redundant and even counterproductive .
Nic
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