How do emotions change the way our decisions are made?
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ELI5: emotions are why we make decisions in the first place. Just think about a decision you made, and keep asking “why?” until you can’t answer the question, and you’ve arrived at emotions (or at least some intrinsic human behavior).
What would it mean if we didn’t have emotions? Would we even do anything? Your wants, likes, fears, and so on don’t merely factor into your decisions, but are what drive you to consider them in the first place. Even a psychopathic serial killer is at the end of the day is driven by emotion. What else would would their motives for killing be? Even if they stood to gain something by it, that’s still an emotion providing the impetus (greed).
An interesting counterpoint is to consider an emotionless AI that has the goal of, say, producing as many paper clips as possible. Presumably the AI is able to work towards its goal without any emotions. But how did the goal get there in the first place? Its intrinsic goal of paperclip production it part of its “biology” in some sense. Perhaps some things are like this for humans as well, where we somehow have ingrained “default” behaviors, but I would argue that such a behavior is definitionally emotional in nature (though this depends, I suppose, on how exactly you define “emotion”).
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