On the difficulty of understanding emotions

"MacLean's basic idea was that in primitive animals the visceral brain was the highest center available for coordinating behavior, since the neocortex had not yet evolved. In these primitive creatures, the visceral brain took care of all the instinctual behaviors and basic drives underlying the survival of the individual and the species. With the emergence of the neocortex in the mammals, the capacity for higher forms of psychological function, like thinking and reasoning, began to emerge and reached its zenith in man. But even in man, the visceral brain remains essentially unchanged and is involved in the primitive functions that it carried out in our distal evolutionary ancestors... our emotions, in contrast to our thoughts, are difficult for us to understand precisely because of structural differences between the organization of the hippocampus, the centerpiece of the visceral brain, and the neocortex, the home of the thinking (word) brain."

--LeDoux, J. (1998) The Emotional Brain. p. 94 .

I am attending a seminar at the university in which the explanation, interpretation and significance of "emotions" will be examined from a contemporary (and therefore necessarily interdisciplinary) point of view. I am very excited with the subject. In particular, I am anxious to see how emotions can take place within a theory of rational action, that is, how emotions can be part of a rational explanation of action. Traditionally, emotions have been ignored in most attempts to account for action, which have instead focused on beliefs and desires as causes (in that sense reasons) for acting. It is also marvelous, at last, to read authors from other disciplines within a course in philosophy.

escucho: Californication, The Red Hot Chili Peppers/Californication