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It depends on what you mean by survival, also classifying them as 'algorithms' is incredibly lazy thinking, doing that confuses the basic issue because you start to attribute properties of algorithms to emotions etc.

A good read on it is 'Why we cooperate' https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/why-we-cooperate by Tomasello, he comes at it from an anthropological perspective, a quick example is 'guilt', guilt is an emotion that allows other members of our tribe to see that we're sorry and to forgive us, if the tribe doesn't forgive then you're exiled and die. So your survival in that context is dependent on emotional responses etc, but reproduction certainly isn't dependent on emotions.



Interesting example with 'guilt' as an emotion that may help to foster cooperation. This reminds me of an idea of evolution being treated as a thermodynamic process and 'punishment' as a crucial mechanism in the evolution of cooperation. The authors argue that "punishment acts like a magnetic field that leads to an 'alignment' between players, thus encouraging cooperation."[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608139/new-model-of-evolu...


Shame is a firmware interrupt, as described in Donald Nathanson's Shame and Pride, a book on Silvan Tomkins' Affect Theory.




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