Hi All,
I'll keep this brief!--I have been brainstorming ways to best organize my term paper, and I thought blogging about it may help by creative process! Sooooo....here is my hypothesis: Organisms with greater diversity of emotions are more likely to have higher ordered intelligence. My reasoning lies in the assumption that emotions were the major evolutionary prerequisite for a theory of mind (TOM), which is a major component of social intelligence, ultimately leading to evolutionary by-products such as proficiencies in math, language, and abstract thinking. TOM has been established as a prerequisite for social intelligence and emotion interpretation have been previously identified as a component of TOM; however, never before has the diversity of emotions been addressed in the context of TOM and subsequently intelligence. The burden is on me to provide evidence which supports this. One type of evidence is to provide association between a organisms emotional diversity and perceived intelligence. I can do this by inferring emotional diversity by using markers such as facial expression diversity (eg a snake has relativity not expression compared to an great ape. Therefore the ape would be expected to have greater emotional diversity). However, this assumes there is no purpose for emotion if you cant express it, which may not necessarily be true ( ex fear. you don't need to express fear in order to act on it and escape from a predator). Considering this, I'll need to couple these observations with cognitive neurobiological data. Also, I can use other non facial ques such as complexity of speech or body language since since emotion can be expressed via these means as well. Throughout all of this I will need to provide parameters of intelligence and frame my argument in a evolutionary context.
Any ideas how to better organize this?
Pass them on!
Until next time,
Ryan
So my understanding of emotions is that they are here to make us to things. Like you said fear makes us run away from dangerous things, it is self preservation. And happiness makes us go back to things that keep us healthy, like blackberries are good for you and taste good. So you want to say that emotions evolved in more intelligent beings as a way to keep us alive longer? Vs. say a fly who may not fear anything and so it flies into a car windshield and dies?
ReplyDeleteHi Ryan! I think that using this technique of free-writing is a great way to help get your ideas out there in the open and hopefully in the future create organization of those ideas. This technique reminds me of incubation and how you are taking time to marinate in order to more creatively come up with a cohesive and well-written review. Best of luck! It sounds intriguing from what I have gathered from your blog!!
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