Why curiosity beats fear.
I can understand people react more to emotions than to thoughts . Also I can understand some people want to think purely rational without those emotions coming from the secret vaults of the soul. We think we can control our rational thoughts completely (haha) while our emotions seem to control us more than we do them.
Emotions seem to evolve without thinking from a deeper part of us,but do they ? Seems to me emotions are triggered by some thoughts ,some understanding (aware or unaware ?) of some situation which can itself be triggered by some music or some older memories . What interests me are emotions without obvious reason ,like walking peacefully towards a beautiful sundown and being hit unexpectedly by a sudden sadness or a strange kind of homesickness.I believe such emotions are typically human ,I do not know whether they could be determined genetically ,like an instinct almost. Let me call them instinctive emotions . I do not think rage and love are instinctive emotions, there are thoughts and analysis preceding the emotion , but probably surprise or awe are? Perhaps fear too . These instinctive emotions call for investigation by curiosity .
Curiosity is a kind of emotion but one particularly linked to the cognitive process ,an invitation to start thinking. You might believe curiosity was at the origin of critical thinking and analysed observing .
Curiosity saved the cat ,it was carelessness that killed it !
In the scale of emotions and hybrid emotion-ideas curiosity has a special position ,indeed I would view curiosity as a hybrid idea-emotion ,you can be curious about observations from reality but also about abstract constructions as well as any emotion or memory ,that puts it on the level of thinking itself.
There is a natural form of curiosity at the animal level,so let us call it object-curiosity. If a cat discovers the presence of a strange object ,say a luminescent ball ,the cat will act with a lot of caution but it will not run away and ignore the strange ball . Once the cat established that the ball is no threat she will “play” with it ,infact that is a form of further structural research if you stretch definitions somewhat.
This kind of curiosity at the “animal” level can be transferred to the abstract level ,this is probably only done by people. It is again an application of the learning process principle where the cognitive structures built are being applied to abstract objects even without any (observable )reality behind them , ie that is an action at the basis of fantasy and it also relates to our abstract free will. Let us call this abstract-curiosity .So humans may be really curious about the properties of groups under group morphisms ,or about a probabilistic description of reality at the micro-level !
In language we tend to speak about curiosity meaning the initial “urge to investigate” but as so often ,in reality,curiosity is a process in time. It starts with some observation (of some real phenomenon or of some abstractly defined concept !) ,then there is a feeling of surprise triggered by the lack of understanding. At that point the process may die out by lack of interest ,but if the intensity of “curiosity” is high enough there is enough motivation to start a cognitive process I call “research” but this is an abuse of language,the research here is not necessarily done by the scientific method (although it can be,of course).When talking about the more primitive object-curiosity the “structural research” I mentioned above will be in more “primitive” terms ,usually by direct experiments in reality linking simple ideas to manipulations of the object. Abstract-curiosity will typically lead to more complex reasoning about the hidden nature of abstract concepts and their relation to other abstract concepts but also to other realistic objects perhaps. It is clear that in general the object-curiosity may extend into abstract-curiosity and conversely,depending on the path of reasoning used in the process “curiosity”.
I have to come back to the notion “intensity” of curiosity which is directly linked to motivation for further research . This intensity is a very personal trait and it is related to what we call interest of the person in the phenomenon,this again depending heavily on the cognitive history of the person’s thoughts ,the experience and strength of the memory.The interest is an evolved version of some instinct for survival ,so with some poetic liberty one may conclude that : curiosity is part of the survival strategy. The same can be said of fear . There are deep relations between curiosity and fear (perhaps a reason why even kids love horror stories) and usually curiosity beats fear!
Indeed ,the only way to get rid of fear is to investigate the source of it . Yes,this may be delayed for years ,decades or even centuries in the evolution ,but for every fear there is a time to die. For that it is necessary for knowledge to reach a certain threshold and that moment is when curiosity becomes stronger than the fear and that happens in finite time.