Section 1: Are our emotions an advantage or disadvantage to us?

What are the consequences of a life without emotions (let’s assume it is possible)? e.g. fear, anger, happiness, love, jealousy, shame, admiration, pride, guilt, contempt etc.

Some advantages and disadvantages that I can think of:

Advantages of emotion:
1) Adds aesthetic value to the world
2) Helps us understand the world more easily? (but not necessarily better)
3) Emotions like fear help us stay away from danger

Disadvantages of emotion:
1) When a person is emotional, s/he is less likely to think logically
2) Mismatch in emotions may result in a conflict
3) Encourages a life that fulfills our emotional and hedonistic desires

What do you think? How would life be like without emotions?

Added: In this case, let us assume that being logical (but without being emotional) is a good alternative to being logical and emotional.
Added: Discussion about life without emotions

Section 2: Bringing the best out of human emotions
Since many of us have the opinion that it is futile to discuss life without emotion, let's continue the discussion about how we can bring the best out of human emotions.

Part 1: Let's start with the types of desirable and undesirable emotions (e.g. Is anger really undesirable? How about jealousy? etc.).

This post has been edited by Thinkingfox: Aug 9 2009, 08:42 PM

Emotions are the only way to feel something. And unfortunately for us, to feel something is part of our perception, so even if you perceive that emotions shouldn't exist at all, that's your emotions at work, inevitably.

having emotions is what makes us so human...

If life is without emotion, we won't progress. The satisfaction (happiness) of achievement are the main factor that drive human to keep on improving themselves. Be it for good or bad, it brings development. WW2 start because of greed for power, together with it brings new technology, our airplane won't be as advance as today if it wasn't because of WW2.

Not to mention the anxiety when we are curious, we won't have people like Newton and Einstein.

Religion is also an aftermath of human emotion. Hope and Fear makes people believe in God and etc.

But the world won't be bad either without emotion. Perhaps we may not even have cars today because of lack of anxiety, curiousity. But because we don't have emotion, we won't feel angry because we have to walk long distance to reach a certain destination.

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Added on July 29, 2009, 10:03 pmAnd by the way, it won't make the world less meaningless, because we won't know how it feels by being meaningless.

This post has been edited by Aurora: Jul 29 2009, 10:04 PM

If we operated on logic alone (just like the Vulcans in Star Trek) we can still progress. For example, we'll invent the airplane because it is a faster means of transport and is therefore logical to learn how to build. But if the mass production of it is detrimental to the environment and threatens our survival, then we won't build so many because logically life is more important than convenience. So, I think it's possible to live a life without emotions.

You mean being less meaningful, right?

This post has been edited by Thinkingfox: Jul 29 2009, 10:15 PM

There were once I went to service my car, and the service centre shows one of the ASTRO documentary show, and the conclusion from the show is:
Monkey have higher intelligent than human.
And the documentary investigate why Human progress better than Monkey.... and the conclusion is that Human can control emotion.
Monkey is too emotional that leads to them unable to progress their own monkey kingdom

I'm not convince that we would progress that much base on logic itself. At low level, (assuming we are the vulcan race) if we were ask to complete a task in impossible time, yeah, we would start to think, generate ideas and evolve.

But at higher level, if the leader is a logic-base person, he would reason that if the work is impossible, then he won't ask his subordinate to carry the impossible task. Without that instruction, we would use the same method over and over again.

In big organisation and society, the desire for power, influence, satisfaction from being the first, receive acknowledgment, praise, help human to evolve. Even grief and sadness also contributes to human evolution. Because we treasure our life, our health and medical technology advance rapidly.

If life is without emotion, I think the food also sucks. We eat to give us energy, not taste.

This post has been edited by Aurora: Jul 30 2009, 06:48 PM

Do you mean this video? This video shows that they have better short-term memory only.

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Added on July 30, 2009, 11:00 pmIn my opinion, having no emotions would mean that we wouldn't waste time on tasty food, leisure, sex, looking good, being the best, fighting etc. because we do only what we need to survive. Then we would be able to concentrate on our logical endeavours.

Not to say that if people had no emotions, we would not have any argument but the arguments we would have would be to try to figure out the best approach in doing something.

Having a leader would be natural as it is a more efficient (hence more logical) way of doing something. Without having ego, leaders would not feel ashamed of listening to their subordinates.

Furthermore, without the urge of wanting to win, any good ideas could be discussed openly (instead of hiding secrets to have the upper hand) and implemented if it is for the benefit of the human race (again because it is logical to do so).

And discussions won't turn into fights simply because we won't have anger or pride.

This post has been edited by Thinkingfox: Jul 30 2009, 11:01 PM

The video is only a subset of the whole documentary... I remember I service my car on Saturday afternoon and so happen to watch the documentary...
Anyhow, monkey is very emotional to the extend they have difficulty to cooperate among them-self

I agree. Progress is subjective though, if you mean progress in terms of technology and material advancement, then yes, based on logic alone we will be able to do so. However, if progress is to be evaluated on a whole, then emotions would definitely need to play a part.
Living a life without emotions might be possible, yet pointless, don't you think? Of course, the only people who would realise the pointlessness of living without emotions are the people who actually do have emotions. Luckily the emotionless won't consider suicide or ending life, though, just based on the fact that, well, they don't care.

Yes, as you said, life would be pointless (in the human sense) but people without emotions won't care about it. Hmm..what do you mean by on a whole?

i think emotions is what drives humans to progress. the desire to get a certain something. take your example of making planes to travel faster for instance. what drives people to want to travel that far and fast in the first place? i don't think traveling a long distances is a key need for survival. it's the emotions that motivates the invention.

Advantages of emotion:
1) Adds aesthetic value to the world
2) Helps us understand the world more easily? (but not necessarily better)
3) Emotions like fear help us stay away from danger


1) Aesthetic values are not a necessity in human advancement.
2) Obviously not, we can make better deduction without emotions.
3) Bad decisions resulting from fear is far more likely to happen.

There is no advantage in having emotions but its something we can't get rid of and just have to deal with.

agreed,

I've a question though, would human even survive this far if we had no emotions? If we are without emotions, then how would humans protect their own kin? In case of a natural disaster, the casualties would just be numbers to us and maybe by logic we will devise a way to reduce the amount of casualties but still the ones that died would not even matter. Maybe we'll even result to euthanasia in hospitals too in case of diseases of unknown cure. Without knowing what is hope what else is there left for these terminally ill patients.

I think that without emotions, we will all die at an unthinkable rate. Since death is nothing and we'd have no idea about enjoying what is life, maintaining the population would be quite a task at hand. Then comes the question of maintaining the population, if we don't have emotions and have sex for the sake of increasing the population, then it wouldn't matter who we have sex with. As long as the role is fulfilled. We won't be picky or even territorial at all about it. Cloning or incest would not even be questioned wouldn't it?

I believe that it is emotion that has kept us alive until today.

Your statement on emotion is something part of the survival mode...
Without emotion, there is no strive for mankind betterment...
but the real debate is should we allow emotion to fully control us?

Of course humans will protect their own kins even if we had no emotions. Logically, it would not be sound to the let other human beings suffer/die because they are our fellow creatures and any death would still be a loss. Furthermore, without emotions, we would probably treat every other human being equally because there would be no need to discriminate based on our race, gender or age. I'm sure if we were rational beings issues like euthanasia would be carefully thought out and debated. The best thing is that our decisions won't be affected by emotions

Death would still be a loss to the human kind but the difference is that we won't get emotional about death. Since incest would lead to in-breeding and unhealthy offspring, it is less likely to happen in non-emotional society than for us humans who are lustful. Of course such issues would be questioned and thought out thoroughly. The things about being logical is that you think logically and the decisions made would not be interfered by emotions.

<<Cloning or incest would not even be questioned wouldn't it?>>

This statement affirms my suspicion that you've got the wrong impression about what it is to be logical.

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Added on August 1, 2009, 6:51 pmTrue, emotions is a driving factor for us to improve ourselves. But emotions is not necessarily the only factor. I believe we could improve even if we were logical (but emotionless) beings.

Humans: Travel slowly (Walks) without vehicles -> Driven by emotions, get's frustrated -> Consider other options -> Invent vehicles

Logical (but emotionless) beings: Travel slowly (Walks) without vehicles -> Driven by logic, deduce that walking is not the most efficient solution -> Consider other options -> Invent vehicles

This post has been edited by Thinkingfox: Aug 1 2009, 06:52 PM

I think I get morals/logic and emotions mixed up there for a moment. My emotions was in the way.

putting survivability aside,

now that I think of it, Imagination is not a part of Emotion isn't it? I guess emotions are catalyst for imagination in terms of human progress but even without emotions imagination is still there. So progress without emotion is still feasible perhaps, at a slower pace.

The emotion point you're putting is on people whom have no desire to improve or lazy...
imagine the emotion to have the fastest car, to have car float on water, car that have wings to fly, bigger car, and etc...

Emotions is a must for humans. The only thing i can think of an emotionless human, is not human.

Tools that we called today, were made by humans. Tools are emotionless but human decides on what type of emotions the tools will be depending on their liking.

Take example of knife. Knife is emotionless, but it can be used to chop stuff or kill people. There are no hesitating in knife when it comes to action. But humans are different.

If i use a knife to kill people, yes, percentage of succeed is always 100%

If i use human to kill people, no, percentage of succeed is varied depends on their emotions.

Tools (emotionless) are not = to Humans .

There is no such thing as advantages and disadvantages of having emotions. Saying that is like saying there are advantage of having a brain, and not having one. It is part of what makes human. It varies from how one's manipulate it. Emotion is a critical factor in every humans and this factor is one of the factor that varied us from one another.

It's true that due to emotions (the desire to be superior), we improve on existing technologies. But in the process on inventing, manufacturing, improving, we do quite a lot of damage too.

1) Greed
-Greed drives us to copy others to earn money quickly instead of spending our time looking for other ways to improve society (maybe through other inventions, innovations etc.)
-The desire to earn from our inventions before someone else copies it makes us release our product quickly and without enough considerations for the environment, safety factor etc.
-The desire to earn money with little care of the environment

2) Short-sightedness
-Many of our inventions and other actions have lead to the destruction/deterioration of nature
-Some of the consequences of our actions are permanent or will last long enough to affect generations (e.g. destruction of the ozone, the extinction of many species of animals, the murder of our fellow human beings etc.)

3) Frustration and the lack of persistence
-Yes, I know Thomas Edison tried to make the light bulb many times (rumour has it that he tried 2000+ times) before he succeeded. But how many of us are like him?

I'm sure we have other weakness/es that I can't think of right now.