Quotes About Emotions

99 per cent of our decisions – including the most important life choices concerning spouses, careers and habitats – are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires.18

Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that evolution has molded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last for ever. Sooner or later they subside and give place to unpleasant sensations.

mundane feelings of heat and itching are every bit as mysterious as feelings of rapture or cosmic oneness.

Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love—even in the matrix.

Sin embargo, para lo bueno y para lo malo, las elecciones y los referéndums no tratan de lo que pensamos. Tratan de lo que sentimos.

Puede sufrir en verdad una nación? ¿Tiene una nación ojos, manos, sentidos, afectos y pasiones? Si se la pincha, ¿sangrará? Claro que no. Si es vencida en la guerra, pierde una provincia o incluso renuncia a su independencia, pero no puede experimentar dolor, tristeza ni ningún otro tipo de desgracia porque no tiene cuerpo, ni mente, ni ningún tipo de sentimiento. Lo cierto es que se trata solamente de una metáfora.

What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

A seu tempo, os algoritmos podem aprender a compor músicas do início ao fim, usando as emoções humanas como se fossem teclas num piano. Com base nos nossos dados biométricos, os algoritmos até podem produzir melodias personalizadas de que só nós, no mundo inteiro, é que gostamos.

The more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer

The world of thought, belief and feeling is by definition far more difficult to decipher.

People think that this political revolution or that social reform will make them happy, but their biochemistry tricks them time and again.

This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles' heel of liberal democracy. For once somebody (whether in Beijing or in San Francisco) gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

When you force yourself to laugh, you use different brain circuits and muscles than when you laugh because something is really funny. Humans cannot usually detect the difference. But a biometric sensor could.9

The most important thing I realised was that the deepest source of my suffering is in the patterns of my own mind. When I want something and it doesn't happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering. Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step towards ceasing to generate more suffering.

Some believe that if we could only crack the genetic code and map every neuron in the brain, we will know all of humanity's secrets. After all, if humans have no soul, and if thoughts, emotions and sensations are just biochemical algorithms, why can't biology account for all the vagaries of human societies?

Repeated studies have found that there is a very close correlation between good marriages and high subjective well-being, and between bad marriages and misery.

science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only - pleasant sensations in their bodies

If this is so, then our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn't so important whether people's expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves.

So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles.

Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality. If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal voting rights – or perhaps any voting rights at all.

Whereas humanism commanded: 'Listen to your feelings!' Dataism now commands: 'Listen to the algorithms! They know how you feel.

Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will instensify

The better we understand the biochemical mechanisms that underpin human emotions, desires, and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behavior, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers, and lawyers

Así, los sentimientos no son lo opuesto a la racionalidad: encarnan la racionalidad evolutiva.