source
My immediate thought is that basic consciousness is just our brain’s way of processing multiple inputs of information. Thinking is your ability to make decisions. Consciousness is the experience of taking input and making inferences and decisions from it. It’s the combination of the senses that you experience. Of course, this doesn’t directly explain things like love, or compassion, or generosity. Or hate, or distrust, or greed. I have my own thoughts as to why these emotions appear, though. Still, I think that this answer’s exurb1a’s question, how he so delicately put it, “why the fuck is orange?”.
In my opinion, the more polarized emotions are just ways that our brains tell ourselves to do certain things. Emotions like love tell us to find a mate and reproduce, emotions like greed tell us to gather power over others, a dog feels happy when they see you because you’re it’s source of things it needs to survive, food, water, etc. the orca cares about it’s children because they are the next generation of it’s species. Given that these emotions are constant throughout humanity, they must be coded into our DNA, just as consciousness is.
