What my last post gets me thinking about it the reason why emotion is necessary for proper human thought, and I think the reason is the fact that life is filled with uncertainty. The irony is that the scientific method has come to this exact same conclusion, formalized physically as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and mathematically as Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness, and it really isn’t until recently that the selective advantage of emotion has been discussed in a scientific manner.

I think what emotion allows us to do is process uncertainty properly. And I’m not just talking about using intuition. I’m talking about being able to handle mathematical unknowns, which I think is a uniquely human characteristic. A simple way to think of this is that emotion allows us to (subconsciously) quantitatively weigh unknowns. Is this variable important or not, for example.

Now, whatever tricks we program into our machines, we can’t quite really get computers to do this yet. A computer program will generally halt until the answer to an unknown variable is known. In advanced microprocessors that can handle pipelining, you don’t have to calculate absolutely everything before the program can run, but if one thread needs an answer and the other thread that will provide it hasn’t finished calculating it yet, the original thread will just hang there until there is a value available.

I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point where we can keep a program running even if the answer to a particular variable is yet unknown. We can program in various tricks to allow a program to not need that value until it has been calculated, but pretty much all programs will crash if you feed it an undefined value. But in stark contrast, human beings handle and run with undefined values all the time. I mean, how often have you been in a situation where you knew the value of all the variables involved? Where you have absolutely no uncertainty in what is going to happen next? This is, like, never, and I think our ability to emotionally weigh unknowns is the only thing that keeps us from freezing up all the time. Without the ability to emotionally weigh unknowns, we would never be able to make decisions (and interestingly, this is exactly what happens to people who have their emotional subsystems disconnected from their reasoning loop—they can’t make decisions to save their life.)

There is an idea out there that the way we handle uncertainty is through quantum mechanical means. Every undefined value is simply a wave function that hasn’t collapsed yet, and our brains are just gigantic quantum computers that somehow figure out the state of reality through the collapsing of wave functions. I’m not sure if we really need to get quantum uncertainty involved in human emotional reasoning. I think that the brain still does things mechanistically. Since the brain is the product of millions of years of evolution, it is probably programmed with various default values for certain things. What allows us to learn, however, is the fact that the brain is also a storage system and a pattern recognition engine. Maybe the brain does hyperthread like a microprocessor does, and has threads that hang until values are calculated for various unknowns. The thing is, the brain doesn’t need a correct value to continue processing. All that matters is that there’s some kind of value returned, and maybe sometimes that value is simply the default value that is genetically encoded. This works because evolution has fined-tuned our systems to gel very well with reality, even if our consciousness loop isn’t really aware of how it works. The reason I bring up the storage device and pattern recognition engine analogies is that because of these functions, the brain doesn’t have to rely on genetically-derived defaults. What probably happens is that the brain will recognize it is in a situation it has never encountered before, will search its stored memories to see if there’s something even remotely similar to this situation (and since reality tends to be more monotonous than not, and since evolution has fine-tuned our thresholds for monotony and uniqueness to correspond roughly with reality, chances are the brain will find a match. Then again, some of us can go through life associating things rather freely) and it will use this previously calculated value as a default instead. The thing is, since we are constantly, literally, second-by-second being faced with decisions and interactions and reality in general, we quickly build a very rich database of memories. (And, by the way, it’s no accident that we really don’t reach our peak intellectual function until a couple decades of absorbing reality.) With every successful match with reality, the associations strengthen. We learn.

(As another aside, I think the challenge for a successful Turing Machine is being able to handle Gödelian incompleteness with the aplomb that the average human being does.)

Where does emotional processing come in? Well, it doesn’t require us to handle all this decision making in our consciousness loop. The memory retrieval and pattern recognition probably occur at a relatively low level. What makes us differ markedly from a computer is that the consciousness loop doesn’t need to actually know what the exact value the brain has retrieved. Instead of transmitting a full, high-level, fleshed out picture of the data these subsystems have retrieved and/or calculated to the consciousness loop, the subsystems just have to emit emotional signals. Remember that axon transmission times are pretty slow, often measured in seconds (this is in contrast to computer devices, which frequently measure signal transmission rates in milliseconds, microseconds, and nanoseconds.) Emotion enables us to function effectively in real-time. Imagine if you had to make all decisions at the conscious level. I can tell you that this wouldn’t work very well in the emergency room or on the battlefield.