[kang]

Emotion is ingrained reason through the process of evolution. For example, we feel disgust seeing an open wound because apes who didn't care got infected and died. The ones who learned to stay away, through reasoning their observations, later on abstracted it to the emotion of disgust, rather than spending energy to reason it out every time.

Similarly, a good fragrance could easily be a bad fragrance to an alien. Maybe, because good fragrances are associated with eatables, our mind categorised it to be a "good" fragrance.

Emotion is a mechanism developed by the brain to not spend energy reasoning things out every time. We understand this today and hence decide that emotion is a bias in the scientific method, but since we are humans and emotional by evolution/definition, we prove that bias did not occur by providing data for the experiment to be reproducible.

However, the evolutionary reason for the development of a particular emotion might not exist anymore. We now know that urine is sterile and no longer need to be disgusted. There are many tribes that have learned this and although the natural emotion of disgust might kick in, they still use it for its antiseptic properties to heal wounds. Many hindus drink cow urine.

[pron]

It's interesting that you bring up disgust, because that exact reaction is at the core of the seminal work by the sociologist Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process[1].

He traces the evolution of manners through etiquette books (a remarkably enduring genre going back many centuries), and shows how things that evoke a strong digust response in us today were actually slow-evolving social norms that have been internalized and turned into habitus (or a super-ego), and he even mentions urine, which for a long while hadn't evoked the same reaction as today. For example, some centuries ago in Europe, urinating under the staircase indoors was actually quite acceptable, and blowing your nose into the tablecloth was considered good manners.

This, of course, doesn't mean that the capacity for disgust isn't evolutionary, but that its particular triggers are social, even though we perceive them to be natural.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process

[gress]

Actually not. This is your explanation for what emotion is, based on your scientific framework. It is not some kind of absolute truth. Given that you have no explanation for consciousness, there is a limit to your framework when it comes to explaining emotion.

[kang]

No this is not my conclusion. The reason I specifically talked about disgust, as opposed to the context of good fragrance in the previous comment, is that it specifically is a scientific conclusion, read in the works of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom among others.

The debate is whether emotion is independent of reason, and both are pretext under consiousness, so you are sidetracking.

[gress]

I'm not sidetracking. I'm pointing out that you are affirming the consequent by simply declaring statements about what emotion 'is'.