dennett > Quotes

“Some cognitive scientists have taken the moral of the story to be that logic is not enough. To get a behaviorally adroit and resourceful agent, you have to supplement your cognitive system, with its perceptual subsystems and memory subsystems and inference subsystems and the like, with an emotional subsystem (or two or three or more). But we-along with others (e.g., Damasio 1994; de Sousa 1987; Elster 1996; Frank 1988)-want to draw an even more radical conclusion: Emotions are not a set of important subsystems sitting alongside the cognitive subsystems; in the brain, emotions rule. We mean this literally. All control in the brain, all prioritizing, all organizing, all demoting and promoting, starting and stopping, enhancing and squelching within cognitive processes, is done by what we refer to as the cognitive emotions or, more precisely, the epistemic emotions.⁴ These are a set of emotions that, together, have the effect of encouraging the mental behaviors that constitute a certain form of reasoning and epistemic assurance.”
― dennett