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If a tree falls in a forest, does another tree feel heartbroken?
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umans define the experience of “emotion” in their own terms, and exclude non-humans from this definition on the same grounds.1 Does this reflexive understanding of emotion as human-exclusive really have merit? Trees are not humans, that much is true. But if our emotional and intellectual superiority lies in our cognitive capacities, it doesn’t help this claim to superiority that there’s much we still don’t know about the human brain, or any brain for that matter. We still understand relatively little about how consciousness arises, so certainly we cannot epistemically claim that our perception of the world is more real, smart, or emotional than that of other species. And yet, as scientists begin to uncover data on everything from dolphin to extraterrestrial intelligence, we still cling defensively to what we might call our final frontier: the capacity for emotion. The premise that we and we alone reserve the ability to “feel” emotionally (and arguably also sensationally) seems contrived. A problem of parts even arises from the equivocal term “feel”: namely, what facet of emotion is essential to its existence? To explore the essence
of what could be a contentious, dare I say “emotionally loaded,” topic, I will attempt to limit the domain of my argument to a narrower, physicalist space. Through the lens of this reductive physicalism, one that reduces emotions to their physical qualities, our understanding of “emotion,” therefore, can be reframed as an effect of the corporal mechanisms.2 In her Theory of Constructed Emotion, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist, claims that “emotions have ontological status as causal entities… [effecting] changes in sensory, perceptual, motor, and physiological outputs.” In other words, emotions exist in so far as they cause physical outputs via the body. But where Barrett leaves flexibility for the coexistence of “feelings” in the input of emotions, Andrea Scarantino, a neuro-philosopher, eliminates their consideration altogether. In The Motivational Theory of Emotions, Scarantino continues to boil down Barrett’s teleology of emotions as existing entirely by their function: to prepare the body for a correct (re)action. Scarantino conceives of emotions as links in a reactionary chain of inputs and out-
1. The most common view of scientists studying animal cognition is that animals experience simple emotions, but lack the breadth of emotions that humans experience. 2. Reductive physicalism is the idea that mental states derive from and can be reduced to physical states.
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