Café Philos: an internet café

When I was going to school some 30 years ago, a friend of mine was working on artificial intelligence for the government. The two of us were both night owls and so we fell into the habit of discussing everything under the moon with each other.

One night, I asked him whether a thinking computer would have emotions. "It would be too intelligent for emotions", he responded. "How's that?", I asked. "Emotions are undeveloped thoughts.", he said, "The computer would think too fast for it to have much in the way of undeveloped thoughts."

Thirty years ago, the notion emotions amounted to nothing more than "undeveloped thoughts" was certainly not exclusive to my friend. Psychologists of the time barely studied emotions, focusing instead on behavior and cognition. Most of those psychologists, if asked, would have told you that emotions interfered with thinking.

The idea that emotions interfere with thinking goes far back in Western Culture. At least as early as the ancient Greeks and Romans, people thought feeling was inferior to thinking, and thought emotions were at odds with clear thinking. When you have a prejudice that deeply rooted in your culture, it's no wonder the psychologists of 30 years ago still clung to it.

All that seems to be changing now. Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered emotions as a subject of study. And some of the early results are astonishing to anyone familiar with the idea that emotions interfere with thought. According to Jonah Lehrer:

When [Antonio] Damasio first published his results in the early 1990s, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions should be a better thinker, since their cortical computer could process information without any distractions.

But Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease.

Of course, it will take quite some time before the culturally ingrained notion that emotions interfere with thought is discarded by most people in favor of a more sophisticated model based on research. For one thing, there are ways in which the old model is true enough. Everyone has experienced a time or two when a strongly felt emotion impelled them to act rashly. And because there is some truth in the old model, it will take a long time before that model is replaced. Yet, we now know it's overly simplistic to say emotions are merely at odds with clear thinking.