Are there alternative ways aliens would think and feel emotions?
Before I start, let me say that I know that what animals think and feel and whether they do it is a highly, highly debated topic. But, for this question, let us just assume that many animals think - in the form of pictorial thoughts - and can feel happy, sad, angry, scared, disgusted and surprised, just perhaps in a less complex way than we do.
There's no reason to think that this shouldn't be true, since all mammals have very similar brain structures to us (Toothed whales have even more than us) and use the same chemicals for thought and emotion.
However, it is likely that alien life, would use different chemicals, and have a very different nervous system.
So, my question is: are our emotions necessary? Are there alternative emotions which could aid a creature in survival, and are pictures the only way to think without language?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120222. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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I don't think you are thinking about thoughts correctly. I am an AI researcher, familiar with the field. It is provably true that the human brain uses sensory information to discern patterns; about the smallest component of the brain is the neuron, and this is a biological thing that is a simple pattern matcher: It can have anywhere from a few, to tens of thousands of inputs (from sensory or other neurons), and when certain patterns appear on its inputs exceeding some threshold, the neuron fires. "I saw this pattern". The signal it outputs goes to other neurons, often many of them, as inputs to their pattern recognition.
Together these build up a "model" of something, which may be an idea, a thing, the state of mind of another person. When a model is activated that is a pattern matching too; and this is how thoughts come to be.
Do we think in words and sentences? It may seem so, but not so much. When you see a car, all the sensory inputs about it trigger a set of neurons in your brain that correspond to your unique internal model of a car (very similar to to others, but unique because it depends on your unique set of car experiences), what to expect from it, how to spell it, how to say it, everything you know about cars is "primed". One of those things is the sound of the word "car", and when that group of neurons gets a signal, you feel like you heard the word car, even though the inputs did not come from your ears. You don't think in sounds and sentences, those are just linked to models in your brain that are being activated. So the same neurons that fire when you recognize a real sound, can be fired by other neurons that recognize a "car" by sight or by reading the word, so it feels almost the same as if you heard it.
The same thing goes for concepts; at the bottom these are groups of neurons that specify relationships between things. "Fast" is a concept, and there are neurons in our brain that can apply a relative speed modifier to all kinds of things, from a fast river, to a fast airplane, to a fast mouse. You might even "see" those things visually, when memories of each are triggered, they also trigger thousands of neural clusters that normally get triggered by the sight. The sight itself is not stored, only the neural consequences are stored, but either way, it feels the same: What you "see" is also just neurons matching patterns, firing, and activating clusters.
It is unlikely aliens would "think" differently than this, but of course their sensory organs may not have anything to do with sound, sight, or even smell. Like ours, their sensory organs would also be distilled into electro-chemical signals, that get pattern matched, and they would also build up models of things that exist in the world for them. Just like us. Their thinking would likely be, like ours, a kind of perpetual chain reaction of modeling the real world, that triggers models, and those trigger models, ad infinitum. The point of these models is mostly to predict the future, what to expect, and whether various actions will promote or prevent what is going to happen.
As for emotions, I would propose they are pretty much the same as what we can find in the animal kingdom; evolution requires certain things like a desire for sex to procreate, a desire to survive involving fear, and fight or flight responses, etc. Not every animal feels "love" or "friendship", not every animal craves company or feels loneliness, not every animal feels compassion or wants to help.
That said, technology is likely something only collective social animals could develop; so I would say any technological species is (as we humans are) likely some kind of tribal, herding or community animal both giving and receiving support from others, thus with instincts of both sharing with others, and punishing free riders. This social nature would also seem to be a prerequisite for developing a complex language, raising and teaching children, all of which promote depth of memory and intellect for developing social norms, e.g. developing unique models of other individuals to "understand" them, meaning predict their behavior, reactions, etc. Of course sociality alone is not enough to ensure high intelligence or technology; wolves are social, chipmunks are social, elephants are social without technology. But I would wager sociality is a necessary ingredient, along with others.
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