Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 05:05:31 PM

Quote from: memvola on November 08, 2012, 04:53:23 PM

Quote from: mobodick on November 08, 2012, 04:30:35 PM

If you want real emotion you would need to evolve it and so you would have to present the same kind of environment to the developing mechanism to make it develop these qualia we call emotions.

This doesn't make any sense. Are you proposing that qualia are transcendental?

I'm not sure what you mean by transcendental.
To clarify my statement, i think anything we think of as conciousness or intelligence is the result of specific information flows in a structure.
Anything you feel in an emotional sense is specific to humans. I would not expect most life to experience emotion because most of life does not have a brain to feel emotion (or experience conciousness for that matter). Mammals propably do feel some sort of emotion but it would not be a very human-like mix of emotion and there would propably be a lot less control over these emotions and a lot less reasoning.

I agree with you on consciousness and intelligence being emergent from basic physical properties. When it comes to emotion, I believe the same reductionist approach, but it has to do with linguistics: Humans are different from all other species because of our ability to codify information into symbols. A hypothesis of mine is that abstractions from generations upon generations living with this ability have resulted in the emergence and evolution of emotions.