Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

An inexplicit idea (emotion, desire, intuition, felt sense, etc.) can be mistaken or contain misconceptions, just like any other idea. When unsure, it can be helpful to try to put it into words, and compare it to your explicit opinions. (N.B. Translating itself is error-prone.)

What would it mean for an emotion to be 'mistaken'?

The ideas that the emotion refers to can turn out to be false. For example, while driving, someone might get angry at another car, but immediately drop that anger if the person realises he was in the wrong lane and it was his mistake. (Not false as in wrong to feel them!)

What about if the emotion turns out not to be a good solution to the problem? (E.g., it's equipping you to fight the guy in the other car, but he's already driving away and also you don't think violence would solve anything.)

Presumably the emotion-content isn't modelling the fact the guy's already gone (because then it would be something like disappointment rather than rage), or that he's not hostile (so compassion instead of anger). It *might* be good to forcibly shut someone up, but not usually.

I think this has something to do with whether emotions have (or are always downstream of) representational content. But I think emotions are often "solving problems" by responding to the world (or disposing us to respond in certain ways) rather than representing/modelling it.

How can it respond to something without modelling it? Doesn't it have to exist in the brain (as an input for computation if nothing else)?

Think about a reflex. There are reflexes that proceed directly from stimulus to response without needing to go to the brain at all, let alone form a representation. You can still talk about inputs and outputs, but not necessarily input->representation->symbol manipulation->output