Outline:

Nature equips us with feelings to determine value

There are two feelings: pleasure and pain. “Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and recoils from pain and so far as possible avoids it.” This capacity is the result of millions of years of evolution.

Choice and avoidance is the mechanism that evolved to help increase the survival of animals. As Dr. Morten L. Kringelbach, a professor of neuroscience at Aarhus University, Denmark and University of Oxford, UK, wrote in a 2016 paper1: “The selection of hedonic reactions has required the evolution of mammalian brains to dedicate millions of developing neurons into mesocorticolimbic patterns of reward circuitry (Haber and Knutson, 2010). Such neural investment was subject to the same selection pressures that shaped evolution of any other function. Hedonic circuitry was therefore unlikely to have been shaped into its present form, or to have persisted throughout evolution, unless objective affective reactions actually conveyed significant consequences in terms of benefits for survival and fitness (Anderson and Adolphs, 2014; Damasio, 2010; Kringelbach and Berridge, 2010; LeDoux, 2012; Panksepp, 2011).”1

Next in the outline: Feelings are contextual

1 “Pleasure systems in the brain” by Kent C. Berridge and Dr. Morten L. Kringelbach, a professor of neuroscience at Aarhus University, Denmark and University of Oxford, UK, U.S. National Library of Medicine 2016