are emtion neccessary?

ok i got this from another forum, thought it's interesting

are emtions really neccessary to humans? can we live in a society which does not rely on emotions but with logic, kinda like the vulcan in star trek. if you take a look at history, there had been countless mistakes which killed thousands simply because there are emotions present. hitler kill jews, emotions: hate. mother teresa sacrafise herself to save others, emotion: love.

let say that from this minute on, all the emotions are erased, can human society keep functioning? i dont know, maybe we can function like the society in fahrenheit 451 and equilibrium

what you guys think

Without emotions the human race would go NUTS. We need to be able to love and hate each other...its kind of a part of Individualism. Without emotions life would be #in boring. Look at the Vulcans...they were the most boring species on Star Trek.

Computation: possible, improbable.

Benefits: No greed. No sense of wonderment and awe of unexplained phenomena. No God, religion or war.

Deleterious effects: No love or joy.

Test: Frontal lobotomy on half of human population, isolate from other half. Observe effects. Lobotomize other half.

I would say emotion is VERY necessary. And as to WWII I have to disagree. I think that what Hitler did was caused by absolutely ZERO emotion rather then hatred itself. It would seem to me you would need zero emotion to do the things he did as Hitler was basically soulless.

Would our society function better ? I highly doubt it. As a matter of fact I think we SO need to up the emotion quotient if we are to remain soulful human beings at all as the more and more I look around as time goes on, I see more and more people losing their humanity. Take the emotionless way most people view a man sleeping on the sidewalk in a cardboard box for example.

No. I would definitely say that going the cold, soulless route is not a good solution for us all.

To remove emotion would deny us the capacity to love. For that reason alone, I can never agree that an emotionless life would be acceptable.

As for Hitler, I believe that at times he was emotional. You only have to see his speeches to realise that. Neither do I believe that he hated the Jews. He blamed the ills of Germany upon them and saw them as less than human. With that in mind, it was easy for him to order their extermination since to him, they were worth nothing. He could not bring himself to feel anything for the jews other than contempt, hence his emotionlessness when dealing with them.

Emotions are necessary !!! Havent you ever seen "Cipher in the Snow"? That poor boy dies because noone loved him. He just keels over, man.

If all emotions were done away with, society would run like a well-oiled machine, everything would be efficient and work precisely as it should. There would be no disruptions or irrational behavior, caused by passions of the heart.

If all emotions were done away with, the world would lack everything that makes makes it an interesting and fun place to live. We would no longer have the ability to be spontaneous and dance a jig, just for the hell of it. We would not see the logic in stopping to smell the flowers, when we could be using the land they grow on, to build a new widget factory. We would no longer have art, music, or dance, since those are creative expressions of emotions.

A perfect society can never exist, as long as people have emotions, but a society worth living in, cannot exist if people don't have emotions.

so you guys would also take the pain that comes alone with joy. i think i would because without emotions, there wouldn't be much of a reason to keep on living

Originally posted by dreamlandmafia
Look at the Vulcans...they were the most boring species on Star Trek.

Not quite. The borg are. The vulcans have emotion. They just control it.
Because they control it too much they rely too much on logical thinking & miss out on their intuitive side.

Emotions help in having drive. Whether we desire or dispise something, we strive through emotions to achieve or avoid that thing. Without emotions we are merely playing out our programing and for a human that would simply be the urge to survive, procreate and aviod situations that would hinder the ability to survive and procreate.

[Edited on 7-6-2004 by Jonna]