Emotions and Thinking

Abstract

The living world, just like the inanimate one, belongs to nature. However, all liv­ing systems, in contrast to the inanimate ones, are unbalanced: they exist in the sta­te of non-equilibrium. Their existence requires constant interaction with the exter­nal environment for consumption of energy and various substances as building materials. It is determined by evolutionarily developed programs in the form of in­stinctive (single-variant) and intellectual (multi-variant) responses to external in­fluences (changes in the external environment). In humans and some other highly developed representatives of the living world, the main reactions are of the intel­lectual type. At the final stage of such responses, one optimal variant is selected. Examples from real life of positive and negative emotional choice determined by the social experience of the individual are given. In this article I explore the idea that the selection criterion for choice optimisation is the emotions associated with the virtual representations of the subjects experience accumulated in their memory. Thus, we solve the problem of understanding of the selection criterion and the vo­litional component of the thinking process at a whole. The role and necessity of emotions in every act of the thinking process becomes more understandable.