From the Active Body to the Mind

Emotions -- proper, appetites, and the simpler regulatory reactions -- occur in the theater of the body under the guidance of a congenially wise brain designed by evolution to help manage the body. Spinoza intuited that congenital neurobiological wisdom and encapsulated the intuition in his 'conatus' statement, the notion that, of necessity, all living organisms endeavor to preserve themselves without conscious knowledge of the undertaking and without having decided, as individual selves, to undertake anything. In short, they do not know the problem they are trying to solve. When the consequences of such natural wisdom are mapped beck in the brain, the result of feelings, the foundational component of our minds. Eventually, as we shall see, feelings can guide deliberate endeavor of self-preservation and assist with making choices regarding the manner in which self-preservation should take place. Feelings open the door for some measure of willful control of the automated emotions.

Evolution appears to have assembled the brain machinery of emotion and feeling in installments. First came the machinery or at the circumstances -- the machinery of emotion. Second came the machinery for producing a brain map and then a mental image, an idea, for the reactions and for the resulting state of the organism -- the machinery of feeling.

The first device, emotion, enabled organisms to respond effectively but not creatively to a number of circumstances conducive or threatening to life -- "good for life" or "bad for life" circumstances and prolonged the impact of emotions by affecting attention and memory lastingly. Eventually, in a fruitful combination with past memories, imagination, and reasoning, feelings led to the emergence of foresight and the possibility of creating novel, nonstereotypical responses.

As is often the case when new devices are added, nature used the machinery of emotion as a start and tinkered a new emotion components. In the begining was emotion, but at the beginning of emotion was action. ~ Page 79 / 80