/sci/ - Science & Math

the closer an animals neural structure is to ours, the closer its experiences can be said to be emotions. But that isn't to say they don't feel or experience something as equally morally valid that we have no comprehension of. Imagine aliens coming down and torturing us because we can't feel "zorg," yet they have nothing comparable to "emotions."

The way evolution works, though, you never start from scratch. There's always something that gets copied and modified. Ultimately, mental pain is comparable to physical pain because it is indeed based on that. They can show up in unusual ways, too. The feeling of someone violating a social norm is not anger (which respondents typically call it). When you record them and look at their faces, they're actually feeling disgust. It's perhaps not a huge surprise that in addition to OCD people being "afraid" of germs or being unclean, many also have obsessive "fears" of becoming homeless, socially degenerate, etc.

It might be plausible to say that spiders, which aren't social, don't experience anything like embarrassment. But they could feel something similar, even something we don't have anymore.

This question is very similar to the qualia problem which I answer in the same way: someone's experience of red might be my experience of purple. But since no one ever reports that their perception of colors switches around randomly, it's likely that this is fairly hard-wired. Since that part of the brain is incredibly similar across people, we can surmise that any differences in color perception are likely to be minor. Of course they still exist - my right eye is ever so slightly more red than my left. On the other hand, as you get older your perception of low-frequency notes changes. Experienced composers often tune their own pianos to awful pitches in order to write music that sounds they way its supposed to sound to other people. So probably audio does indeed vary by person.

tl;dr Emotion is just another qualia problem.