I've never heard a good case that emotions exist. I'm a believer that we have both a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that are activated reflexively by the same types of stimulation that activate them in other animals; and as humans who deal with abstractions as physical metaphors, those abstractions stimulate our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems by activating the same ancient reflexes.
As humans are rationalizers, they construct reasons for these nervous activations after the fact. If you inculcate them with simple slogans that become habitual, they will interpret themselves in terms of those slogans. It's a failure of introspection, or rather a rerouting of any rational introspection through a lens of theory-theory[1].
Are you arguing against dualism? What kind of existence could emotions have that is not "rooted" in the material biological world?
Emotions are a useful concept that helps explain and predict human behaviour and makes human interactions more predictable/rational. If a person is sad at t0 i know that his answer to go to a party at t0+1 will be lower than if his emotional state was happy at t0. That you can describe emotions by biological processes is inconsequential. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind
I've never heard someone say they've never heard a good case that emotions exist before. Would you mind elaborating? For me, I recognize emotione in myself that fit my understanding of the word "emotions", and that is sufficient for me to believe they exist
Many emotions have physiological "symptoms" and are associated with certain brain regions and pathways. Our understanding of biology does not permit us to define emotions to the level of physiological detail that we have for, say, inflammation, but that doesn't mean emotions don't exist
You might like Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” Emotion is, as you say, essentially a higher order function of the nervous system—-some complex way of amplifying and dampening certain systems in order to adapt to circumstances. We understand emotion less clearly than we understand multilayer perceptrons/neural networks/basic learning and reasoning.
But even dogs seem to have emotions, don’t they? My dog gets excited if I offer him a treat, and sad if I don’t give it to him.
As humans are rationalizers, they construct reasons for these nervous activations after the fact. If you inculcate them with simple slogans that become habitual, they will interpret themselves in terms of those slogans. It's a failure of introspection, or rather a rerouting of any rational introspection through a lens of theory-theory[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-theory