Emotion is Perception with Pull

Epistemic Status: My Best Guess. This is an opinion as to what emotion is and why it comes about. Confidence level: 60%. TL;DR: Emotion is one representation which describes and directs, built in largely integrating regions like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insular cortex, which is why the famous patient, Elliot, lost function and feeling together. Emotion is best thought of as being used for conscious agentic steering, while many reflexive behaviors do not need it (e.g. simply eating VS foraging for food at a Wendy’s drive through). Current accounts most similar to mine (like Lisa Feldman Barrett's) stop short of the identity claim I make, preserving this same neo-cartesian error of Damasio's. Reading Guide: The essential sections for my argument are probably 1, 2, and 5. Sections 3 and 4 mostly build the philosophical framing behind it, of which many of you (especially here) may already implicitly agree with. What does Morality have to do with a pair of socks? 1 Meet Elliot He was not flagrant, belligerent, incoherent, nor capricious. He scored normally on IQ tests, passed basic moral exams, and completed just about every laboratory test as anyone with a fully intact prefrontal cortex may have. [1] And yet, he could not pick out a pair of socks. [2] In his seminal work, Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio pieces together the amalgamation of years of research regarding what he calls the somatic marker hypothesis into a coherent narrative explaining exactly how it is we make decisions. At the heart of it was his patient, 'E.V.R.' More famously, he is known as Elliot. From Descartes' Error, 1994: Consider the beginning of his day: He needed prompting to get started in the morning and prepare to go to work. Once at work he was unable to manage his time properly; he could not be trusted with a schedule. When the job called for interrupting an activity and turning to another, he might persist noneth