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Cameron_Taylor comments on Spock's Dirty Little Secret - Less Wrong
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Let's review the statement in question:
By "narrow down", I actually meant "narrow down prior to conscious evaluation" -- not consciously evaluate for truth or falsehood. You can consciously evaluate whatever you like, and you can certainly check a statement for factual accuracy without the use of emotion. But that's not what the sentence is talking about... it's referring to the sorting or scoring function of emotion in selecting what memories to retrieve, or hypotheses to consider, before you actually evaluate them.
The point of emotions -- which I see I failed to make sufficiently explicit in this post, from the frequent questions about it -- is that their original purpose was to prepare the body to take some physical, real-world action... and thus they were built in to our memory/prediction systems long before we reused those systems to "think" or "reason" with.
Brains weren't originally built for thinking -- they were built for emoting: motivating co-ordinated physical action.