Another Perspective on the Red Hat

Why do we have emotions? Aren't simple, value-conferring feelings good enough or something? Emotions cause a host of extraordinary, beautiful and wondrous things to happen in life as well as all sorts of nonsensical and disastrous issues in the world.

Let's look at this a bit more carefully...

A worm probably doesn't have emotions but we might just allow that it has feelings. There is much evidence to support this, apparently.

Do we have emotions because we are noble, sensitive, artistic, expressive, complex, huge-brained, warm-blooded etc. highly-evolved creatures (intrinsic feature)


or


because having emotions has Darwinian survival value? (extrinsic feature)


I favour the second view (whilst acknowledging that the first has elements of truth to it as well)


THE EVIDENCE (gotta have evidence!)


Emotions change the appearance of an organism in the sight of another organism and are therefore slightly unusual to witness

Do I need to illustrate that? No, great- so we'll skip to the next part then.

No - just one clean one:

Maybe think of the way you or I may view the face of Sarah Palin with mild feelings of amusement at her stereotypical look. Now imagine the violently emotional, brain-boiling, artery-bursting hatred and rage she inspires in most feminists



THE CON


A person having an emotion even at the periphery of your field of view is virtually impossible not to look at directly if only for an instant to verify

This can can be exploited to advantage

As Edward de Bono points out near the start of his recent book "Six Information Frames", the mind is instantly drawn to the unusual

This is perhaps less a strength of the mind as a weakness of the mind. This is because the person having the emotion could quite easily be faking it to manipulate you, the observer

"You were really moaning away there darling, I'm glad I excite you. Do any of the others?"

"No. Only you do that to me, honey. See you this time next week?"



sort of thing



So here is the Darwinian survival value part...the human mind - knowing intuitively it's own Achilles Heel - has conspired to manipulate itself to it's own mutual advantage

As a schizophrenic might say "I'm never lonely. I've always got each other"

This is kind of how everybody - as Woody Allen puts it - "sells everyone to everyone else."

Emotions are then a signalling device to a 3rd party - we say we 'have' emotions; in fact we give (or advertise) emotions

If we forget for a moment the wonderful and vast internal experience of emotions, that vast symphonic chorus of chemicals zapping about in our brains when we are well above the baseline mood-wise and for whatever reason...


like


Tchaikowsky's 6th Symphony 1st movement where he claimed to want the audience to feel graphically (through his music) the sheer unutterable anxiety and guilt and shame and despair and agony of his existence (trying to be vaguely gay as a public figure in Tsarist Russia - just imagine that....) Oh boy, I can hear that music right now in my head - it's like a freakin drug. If you want to experience true black dog depression for a good twenty minutes or so, have a listen. It's a virtual reality experience of what it is like to have bipolar disorder.


So


Let's forget momentarily that so well-known aspect of emotions (Aspect One)


Hold in your mind briefly the possibility that emotions did not arise in this way. That's merely a bonus. Simple feelings are good enough to supply the mind with the information it needs to sort out values

We only ever needed emotions in the past to avoid being eaten by a sabre-toothed cat and to let mother know we needed a feed of milk or a change of diaper

This is Aspect Two of emotions

Emotions are there to cause ACTION at critical moments. All the right chemicals start whizzing about in microseconds and we survive the attack by acting in a survival mode

Woody Allen again - "I was like, I was like so scared to death, the, the adrenalin was, was like, squirting outta my EARS!" ("Love and Death" - still his best flick)


But that is not enough - humans don't just want to 'break even' - humans want to 'do better than average'

Don't they? If not - what's a brain for?

That is the undeniable goal of the human race. To become better than what it is somehow. It's a stage-act we have been rehearsing sinse Adam's Balls Dropped. (Era ABD)

Emotions in this sense are just like everything else about us - we only have them because some accidental miscopying of DNA resulted in a useful adaptation

The survival value lies precisely in that emotions are a speechless organism's only way of getting another speechless organism to help it survive somehow

like Bonobos flashing there bums at each other to get a sex coupling going as a reward for something altruistic done by another (could even be a gay coupling with Bonobos, apparently. They don't care. Sex is usually a REWARD for something done on one's behalf. Makes sense to Bonobos, why not Catholics?)

like

scatch my back and I'll...yeah


So,


There's no point in ever being swayed by the emotional impact of anything because it's a kind of a con. Wagner was the master of that. Emotions inflate the importance of everything, often to a fictional extent. Think of the music Wagner wrote for Wotan's Farewell (to his daughter Brunnhilde) in The Ring. It's music that makes your heart soar to the ceiling and then explode like a shower of crimson fireworks

But it's only this old twit of a god performing an honour "virtual killing" of his own favourite daughter because of some ridiculous case of family honour besmirched

YET


Wagner makes us feel like some COSMIC TRAGEDY is unfolding under our very noses and here is the moment when his love LET HER GO - crescendo, crescendo and then the adrenalin starts squirting from our ears

This is of course a bit simplistic but I'm trying to make the point about emotions that, like anything else, there should be no special pleading for them;

"Because you happen to have this overwhelming feeling of self-righteous urgency and dire necessity in connection with something right now does not of itself necessarily implicate me in your issue" (Office wall sign)


Life of course would be dull without emotions because they communicate value to us - well understood point. I said earlier that simple feelings are usually enough to achieve that but things with high value will provoke strong emotions...if you ever want to know what someone's core values are, just pay attention to what gets them all worked up into a froth


Perhaps the greatest value emotions have for us lies in our being able to continuing playing this archaic game of exploitation-by-emotional-blackmail-of-ourselves for a living


As Dawkins points out, we should probably strive to escape from Darwinian evolution because, like our thinking system, it's a kludge

So,

use of the Red Hat in Six Hat sessions should always be offset against the other hats. It would never make much sense to simply pull out the Red Hat and have an emotional binge without any further exploration of the topic. The Hats are NEVER used in isolation if one is using the framework in the way the author specified.