To answer if emotion is another way of knowing, I think the bigger question is what is emotion and how does it affect us? Is emotion relative? Do we learn emotions from others? Many churches teach us that EVERYONE has a conscience. But a terrorist may not (and probably doesn't) feel guilty about killing thousands of innocent people. I, on the other hand, would. The terrorist grew up in different surroundings and had different influences. Maybe these surroundings and influences suppressed his conscience. Therefore, reason and thinking would be above our conscience, above our "instinctive" feelings of guilt, or happiness, or anger. I don't think science even knows what emotion truly is; it IS what makes us human, and it comes from a certain part of the brain, but do nerves and cells simply control these emotions, or is it something deeper than cells and atoms?! This topic is hard--to say whether emotions are another way of knowing besides the senses, we have to know what emotions are----are they relative or not? Do we feel guilty after doing wrong because we were brought up that way, or is it something we're born with, written in our genes? My little sister cried when she was three and watching lion king for the first time. She had never experienced death and sadness, yet she was extremely upset...emotion must not be completely relative.
Emotions are obviously connected with memory--there was a research article in the Harvard magazine about why we remember random things from when we were 5, but we can't remember where we put our keys 20 minutes ago. If a memory is connected with a strong emotion, such as the fear on your first day of first grade, you can remember EVERYTHING about that day. I was 5 years old when i saw my grandma for the last time, but I remember every single detail of that 15-minute point in time. Emotions are obviously important to knowledge-but where do they originate???? That's the question I believe we have to answer before answering Mr. Perkin's question.
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Molly, you raise two huge and important issues here. One deals with culturally shaped emotion. This will be significant when we discuss ethics. If you know it is wrong to do X because the culture you are in shaped you to experience revulsion at X, and another person's culture prompts him to feel a sense of pride in X, leading him to think X is good, which person is right? It will be good to come up with specific cultural examples as we have these discussions.
Your other point comes from your question "do nerves and cells simply control these emotions, or is it something deeper than cells and atoms?!" According to Morpheus in the movie _The Matrix_, reality is nothing more than electrical impulses in your brain. This represents what we call a reductive physicalist model, i.e. things such as emotion, thought, feeling, etc. are not things in and of themselves, but are simply brain states.
What do you think? Are emotion, consciousness, and the like merely electro-chemical brain states, utterly physical and therefore not significantly different from the color of your hair?
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