Would we be safer in a society without emotions?

>Would we be safer in a society without emotions?

An interesting question, though I would hazard to say no. Not necessarily for deep philosophical reasons. The reasons are more technical, biological, neurological and pharmocological. These points will be discussed below.

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>There might have been some guy that had the emotional part of the brain destroyed and couldn't make decisions.

This poster raises a poorly understood point. It appears that emotional context is encoded within memories at an often subconcious level, in addition to the more overt emotional context that memories often have. This has consequences for cognition. Animals with induced deficits in emotional processing via selective ablation of the amygdala or hippocampus, or specific nuclei within those regions show mild learning and cognitive defects. To offer a wild speculation, it seems that listening to your gut may get you answers faster than using just your brain when the information has emotional context (food, fight, fucking).

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>People who are born with no emotions function just fine.

While this posters statement may be a bit generous, it is not wholly unsupported. Animals subjected to amygdala or hippocamampal ablation at a young age adapt better than adult animals given similar treatment. The degree to which this is may stem from differences in operation recover vs differences in plasticity are hard to guage, but the ablations are generally carried out in a very careful manner intended to induce a minimum of collateral damage to adjacent tissues. Still, the treated animals do end up displaying some symptoms consistend with the autism spectrum. They often have failures to socialize, end up being austracized and sometimes develop bizarre hyper-orality behaviors (window licking?) and sometimes hyper-sexuality.

Finally, the idea of subjecting a large portion of the human population to such ablation surgery is untenable. This is literally brain surgery, and it has risks. To apply it on a large scale would require a pharmacological intervention. The problem is that we do not have any Pharm's that achieve the desired end with good efficacy (to my knowledge) and consitency -- we don't have Prozium yet. That's not to say that such a drug could not be produced, but at this time we don't even know what regions of the brain or what receptors could be safely targeted to produce such a drug.

TL;DR - Not having emotions renders the subject mildly mentally handicapped. Current treatments to direlty ablate emotions are unsafe and could not be applied at a population level. We lack good drugs to achieve emotion ablation, and it may not be possible to develop such drugs.

no; but ironically your emotions would get hurt if i pointed out white people are the only ones who would be able to make such a rational world possible.

>You would see all of mankind corralled into a neatly furnished prison, safe and sober, yet dulled beyond reason and sapped of all spirit.

pure logic is all we get if you extract emotions out of the brain

A society without emotions cannot exist.

I certainly would be happier without emotions. Every day I am paralyzed by my depression.

>pure logic is all we get if you extract emotions out of the brain

What is the logical response of an emotionless
actor when faced with a situation that requires a selection of one course of action from a selection of two or more courses action, for which there is insufficient information to determine which of the courses of action are likely to advance the actors objectives, let alone sufficient information to determine which course of action is optimal?

Pure logic breaks down when faced with a lack of information. In such cases random chance sneaks in. The question is whether random chance is a better, or a worse predictor than gut feeling in most cases. I would say that the existence of emotion argues strongly that there is an advantage to having an emotional/intuitive means of processing certain types of data.

Considering the fact that you lack vast amounts of emotions due to depression I don't think you'd have fun having even less.

Maybe consult a doctor about your depression.

>Would we be safer in a society without emotions?
No.