Feeling Came First

December 2nd, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Emotion, Evolution, Feeling, Sense |

Survival and the ability to thrive as an organism depends upon that organism’s ability to respond appropriately to opportunities or threats in the environment; to avoid noxious or threatening stimuli and to maximise contact with stimuli which offers protection, sustenance and (particularly) the opportunity to reproduce. These responses are still with us and are, in all likelihood, experienced in largely the same way as they have been experienced in the evolutionary past, as a set of felt responses. That is, the attraction we experience for a member of the opposite sex, or a delicious cake, or a warm fire on a cold evening, is not the result of an academic, rational, deliberative process in which the potential benefits of such attractions are carefully considered. Rather, these attractions are experienced as feelings, or as a sense of their intuitive rightness. Similarly, the urge to remove our hand from a hotplate, or to run at the sight of a lion, or our experience of disgust at the dirty fork we are given in a cafe are not the result of a weighing up of potential hazards against other possible factors, but are the immediate felt responses to the conditions. Our behaviour in relation to these stimuli is usually appropriate in the evolutionary sense that it will, most likely, confer a survival and reproductive advantage. This behaviour is not the result of conscious thought (a recent arrival on the evolutionary scene) but of the urgings of non-conscious processes which we experience as positive or negative feelings.