Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

370 J HOW THE MIND WORKSpop psychology imperative to get in touch with your feelings, and theHollywood formulas about wise simpletons and about uptight yuppiestaking a walk on the wild side.Most scientists tacitly accept the premises of Romanticism even whenthey disagree with its morals. The irrational emotions and the repressingintellect keep reappearing in scientific guises: the id and the superego,biological drives and cultural norms, the right hemisphere and the lefthemisphere, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex, the evolutionarybaggage of our animal ancestors and the general intelligence that propelledus to civilization.In this chapter I present a distinctly unromantic theory of the emotions.It combines the computational theory of mind, which says that thelifeblood of the psyche is information rather than energy, with the moderntheory of evolution, which calls for reverse-engineering the complexdesign of biological systems. I will show that the emotions are adaptations,well-engineered software modules that work in harmony with theintellect and are indispensable to the functioning of the whole mind.The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces orvestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagatecopies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness,wisdom, or moral values. We often call an act "emotional" when it isharmful to the social group, damaging to the actor's happiness in the longrun, uncontrollable and impervious to persuasion, or a product of selfdelusion.Sad to say, these outcomes are not malfunctions but preciselywhat we would expect from well-engineered emotions.The emotions are another part of the mind that has been prematurelywritten off as nonadaptive baggage. The neuroscientist Paul Mac Leantook the Romantic doctrine of the emotions and translated it into afamous but incorrect theory known as the Triune Brain. He describedthe human cerebrum as an evolutionary palimpsest of three layers. Atthe bottom are the basal ganglia or Reptilian Brain, the seat of the primitiveand selfish emotions driving the "Four Fs": feeding, fighting, fleeing,and sexual behavior. Grafted onto it is the limbic system orPrimitive Mammalian Brain, which is dedicated to the kinder, gentler,social emotions, like those behind parenting. Wrapped around that is