At the dawn of organic sentience, when feelings made their first appearance in the living world, their mission was to take care of the organism, specifically to get it to approach things that are good for it (like food) and avoid things that are bad for it (like toxins). As beings got more complex, the behaviors that feelings induced got more complex than just approaching or avoiding—like, for example, yelling at people who are doing things that are bad for you and flattering people who might do things that are good for you. Another way to put this is that feelings, viewed in the context of
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