You think taking failed insiders, who are therefore not insiders (anymore) at all, are the best source of insider knowledge??

That's like saying that college drop-outs are the best sources on what college is like and what it is supposed to be like. — baker

Or it’s like saying that if I grow up in a homophobic household where such views are connected to a fundamentalist religious belief system, and I emancipate myself from those homophobic beliefs, I have a choice that the other members of my household don’t. I can live within the insular and narrow view that is their only option (they being stuck ‘inside’ that narrow framework) , or I can shift to a decentered thinking in which I subsume their parochial view within a more flexible framework. Thus I can shift back and forth between empathizing with their perspective and freeing myself from their cage.

I might generalize from this and suggest that enlightenment is nothing other than the endless progression in which one moves being encased within a worldview to seeing it as a mere step ion the path to a richer perspective.

“… yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.”(George Kelly).

You think you can have insider knowledge without being an insider? — baker

I think you can have better than insider knowledge by subsuming insider thinking within a more encompassing framework that transcends its limitations. Lapsed Catholics , former cult members and reformed drug addicts are examples.

Or it means that religions are explanatory systems around which rituals and practices are constructed, and as such one can compare their explanatory structures from a critical distance.
— Joshs

I refer to the emic-etic distinction. — baker

The article you linked to concluded:

“When these two approaches are combined, the "richest" view of a culture or society can be understood.”

I dont conclude from the article that one has to be a practitioner of a religion in order to combine the emic and the etic.

I don’t think scholars need to personally practice any of these systems in order to identify parallels between their intellectual frameworks.

This assumes that it is possible to ascertain the truth of a religion without practicing it.
It's not clear how such is in fact possible. And if it is, it means religion is nothing more but a process of going through the motions. — baker

Or it means that religions are explanatory systems around which rituals and practices are constructed, and as such one can compare their explanatory structures from a critical distance.

In one sense we are inclined to say that if I express my thoughts or feelings, then those are my thoughts or feelings. They're not shadows of my thoughts or feelings. — Sam26

For Nietzsche , like Freud, thoughts are the tip of an iceberg. It is the feelings-values lying below the surface as implicit or unconscious that gives thoughts their sense and purpose. People think they know their thoughts , but they often can’t tell you the larger system of values they hold that make these thoughts coherent.

It's much clearer to have a healthy divorce between concepts (sense-data, qualia, cosmological constants) and theories. — Kenosha Kid

Isn’t a concept a mini-theory( fact-value distinction and all)?

MP is saying that a black dot, for instance, can't be perceived in isolation. There has to be something non-black around it.

This is an insight much older than MP. It at least goes back to Hegel. MP is just taking the time to apply the principle to perception. So if he's identifying an illusion, it's that a bit of perception could be independent. — frank

You’re leaving out the temporal , or diachronic aspect of MP’s model. figures must appear against backgrounds, yes. But the whole figure-background gestalt ensemble changes with each new act of perception.

Merleau-Ponty explains that to attend to any experience is not merely to shine a neutral light on it, but to articulate a new sense, the ‘active constitution of a new object'. It is to identify a new figure and in doing so, to transform the sense of the previous figure along with its background.

“Attention, therefore, as a general and formal activity, does not exist.” Rather than there being a general capacity for neutral observation, a universal kind of attention necessary for any moment of consciousness, “it is literally a question of creation. “ “Attention is “a change of the structure of consciousness, the establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori... To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures”.

I don't think anyone moves from scientific findings to global skepticism. Common sense tells you that a representational scheme is vulnerable to skepticism — frank

Yes, but Zahavi’s point is that a phenomenological approach is not vulnerable to skepticism( for the same reason that a Wittgensteinian approach is not).

That is an interesting point. Can we discover truly new things - could it happen incrementally as part of a creative process? An example wouldn't hurt. — Tom Storm

But what is constituted i. experience on the basis of congruity and similarity is new. It is absolutely and completely new. It just so happens that it is also relatable
to what we already have experienced. Think of it this way? What motivates the question of whether we can discover truly more things? It presupposes that that would be a good thing. Isn’t absolute novelty what we crave? Isn’t it associated with adventure, creativity, enlightenment, discovery, progress?

It sounds paradoxical , but I suggest that the experience of true novelty is precisely the experience of chaos, confusion, meaningless and anxiety. What makes something meaningful to us as excitingly new is that it is neither a duplication of prior events nor absolute novelty.

Like I said before, third-person perspectives are simulated first-person perspectives. So if you are going to assert that the first-person perspective is an illusion, then you've just undermined all of your third-person perspectives and knowledge you've acquired by them - which is everything you know — Harry Hindu

Excellent points. Dan Zahavi has made similar arguments against maintaining the neuro-representationalist idea of a veil separating ‘outer’ third personal from ‘inner’ first personal processes.

“ Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external?

“…it is hard to understand how one can motivate a general skepticism about perceptual experience on the basis of neuroscientific findings, since the latter – to some extent at least – presuppose the validity of the former. The main challenge, in short, is not how we can epistemically get out of the brain, but how we could possibly get into it in the first place. How do we at all know that there really is a brain? In order to enjoy any kind of initial plausibility, the neuro-representationalist account that we have been presented with must necessarily be half-baked. It asks us to abandon our naïve realism, our confidence in the objective existence of ordinary objects of experience, but it only does so half-heartedly.

Since the whole theory is constructed around the workings of the brain, the model must presuppose that one worldly object is exempt from its skeptical concerns and that we can indeed observe and describe the brain as it really is. But if indeed the brain as discovered by science is ‘real' in the transcendent sense of the term, then it is hardly convincing that we stop there, claiming that of all we can see and perceive, only one single object, the brain, is ‘truly real' and not just a representation, perceived as it is in itself.”

We all get a larger slice of the money pie and as the economy grows, everybody's "happy" or, more accurately, nobody complains. — Agent Smith

That’s mainly the result of increases in productivity, which is made possible by improvements in technology. That, in turn, depends on scientific progress. And science doesn’t operate in a cultural vacuum. Changes in scientific theory are interwoven with changes i. philosophical ideas, as well as changes in the arts, literature and political theory.

The "happiness pie", sorry to say, is still very much governed by zero-sum game dynamics/rules. My happiness comes at the expense of yours - there are winners and where there are winners, there are losers. This, I suppose, sums up our rather disheartening predicament. — Agent Smith

The question comes down to this: is there no correlation between cultural development and personal satisfaction? Is this aspect of human nature ‘fixed’?
I don’t believe happiness is a competition, because our goals and ways of looking at the world differ, and happiness depends on these factors.

Some considerations here are what authors like Steven Pinker would claim to be a profound decline in overall world violence of all forms as a result of the progress of knowledge. One could liken this progress to the enlightenment that takes place as one goes from
childhood to adulthood. How many of us really would prefer to live and think as the children we were instead of the adult we are now? I think my own childhood was typical, and I’d describe it as islands of intense but brief happiness surrounding by seas of fear.

But I wouldn’t be so dismissive even with rudimentary emotional assessments because their relevance and effectiveness may also depend on the social context: often to have a better understanding of the emotional life of an employer is not only practically unattainable but also unnecessary to correctly understand if it is the right moment e.g. to ask for a pay rise. In other words, often even “a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood” is good enough to navigate smoothly through many ordinary social interactions. — neomac

I agree. I suppose I’m biased by my background in theoretical psychology toward more complex assessments of personality. That’s particularly useful for psychotherapeutic analysis , but I can see how your perspective can be useful in industrial psychology settings.

You seem mainly concerned about what is required to have a better understanding of human behaviour [1], and in order to achieve that you are advocating for a more holistic than behaviouristic approach [2]. This concern is clearly epistemological not ontological. My issue is instead primarily ontological: in other words, I’m discussing about what emotions or moods are. — neomac

My concern is just as ontological as yours. I am also discussing what emotions and moods are.
The ‘ontological’ angle, as you put it, what something is, depends on which approach to psychology we are using. A behavioral definition of such things as moods and emotions will be different than a cognitivist or neurophysiological or embodied enactivist one. I’m trying to find out which approach to psychology you are getting your definitions from.

you are conflating ontological with epistemological concerns — neomac

I’m not sure what’s this means. Do you know?

- Do you agree that mood-terms are particularly suitable to suggest emotional dispositions (as e.g. soluble is particularly suitable to suggest the disposition of salt to dissolve in water)?

You mean if I say someone is in a bad mood this means they might get angry? Yes, and if they are in a good mood they might also get angry. Soluble means salt will definitely dissolve in water. Bad mood doesn’t mean a person will definitely get angry. It means they may get angry. And they may get angry if they are ina good mood. If calling mood an emotional disposition just means that in a given mood the chances of having a certain emotion are more probable than when not in that mood, then I agree. But this doesn’t seem very interesting to me if that’s all you’re trying to say.


Do you agree that in order to detect successfully someone’s mood we do not necessarily need to know background motivations or causes that would explain that mood (as e.g. to detect that salt is soluble doesn’t require any scientific knowledge of the chemistry of salt)? — neomac

If we don’t have some basic knowledge of chemistry, then soluble will mean something quite rudimentary , and our predictions of the behavior of the salt in the water will be very limited. Similarly, detecting a mood requires knowing what a mood consists of , and that requires knowing a bit about the structure of someone’s thinking, and as I already said , motivation is at the very center of the structure of someone’s thinking. We don’t need to know any background motivation if we want to do a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood. We will end up treating ‘predisposition to emotion’ the way a person ignorant of chemistry treats solubility; in a very limited fashion with poor predictiveness.


And what we are detecting with the salt isn’t a disposition, it’s an actual occurrence. The salt is dissolving before our eyes. So then we say that under a certain circumstance the salt will dissolve. If we work backward in the same way from an actual occurrence of emotion, we can look around at the circumstance surrounding the emotion. We may notice that the person said they were in a bad mood before they had the emotion. We could then surmise a correlation between their saying they were in a bad mood and the emotion that appeared.

What would help me at this point is to know if there are any particular writings-theories in psychology that have inspired your ontological descriptions of passion, mood, emotion and disposition. If so, could you direct me to some authors or writings? I would help me understand better what you are getting at and why it seems important to you.

↪Hanover Your problem is thinking that because we see the world in different ways that there must be different worlds. You would look at the duck-rabbit and see two things, not one. Like Descartes, you trap yourself in dualism. — Banno

I don’t know that for Wittgenstein it makes sense to say that they are the same thing. What is relevant is how seeing something as a duck rather than a rabbit changes how we go on.

“ In describing this sort of phenomenon, there is a great temptation to talk of psychological states as if they were objects of some kind. For example, we might say that when we see it now as a duck, now as a rabbit, the external figure - the drawing - has not changed; what has changed is our internal picture - our sense-datum. And if this idea were generalized, it would lead to the very theory of sensory experience that is the target ofWittgenstein's philosophy of psychology - the phenomenalist notion that the objects of our immediate experience are the private, shadowy entities that empiricists call sense-data.”( Ray Monk)

The question to ask about changes of aspect is not: 'What changes?' but: 'What difference does the change make?'

A change in aspect can be a change in life.

Co-inventing"? Not sure what that means. — Ciceronianus

I chose ‘co-inventing’ rather than ‘inventing’ because I’m trying to convey the idea of a world that is produced by us moment to meomtn i the way that a machine is designed to produce an output and then feed that output back into itself to produce a further output. Each new cycle produces an events which do not exactly reproduce
any previous event( output). But at the same time, what each cycle produces is similar to the output of the previous cycle.

You're not part of something you create or invent, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. So when you speak of creating the world, I think that assumes separation from it. — Ciceronianus

Each new event shares elements of likeness and difference with what preceded it. One could say the machine is designed to produce variations on a theme. But it would need to be added that the theme itself must change over time along with the events that it produces.

I am not suggesting that we are just novelty producing machines. What I am trying to convey is that we can only experience the world in terms of similarities and likenesses with respect to our history. Everything we encounter, no matter how new and surprising, has our stamp on it already. Nothing is ever completely unfamiliar to us. We can’t make any claims about a world beyond this relationship without lapsing into incoherence.

As you say, presence or absence is irrelevant to the meaning of (ethical) good and bad. — Constance

Not irrelevant to it. On the contrary, presence and absence are the basis of ethical good and evil.

There is nothing more originary than presence, granted. But as such, vacuous. It is the content that gives us existence. — Constance

What I see you doing (and religious metaphysics in general) is stuffing into the category of ‘content’ everything that gives ethical good and evil its force. What I am doing is taking what you have stuffed into the pigeonholed of content and rethinking f it as process.
As an example of turning content-based ethics into presence-absence based process, think of behavior by another that causes us harm due to a misunderstanding at their end.

In this case we use a process-based approach. Because of an absence of knowledge on the other’s part, we were hurt.Greater insight ( a process of learning) would prevent the problem in future. We dont need to blame wrongful intent ( content-based explanation) to explain the cause of the situation. Instead we can rely on an explanation that depends on organizational features of interpersonal understanding. What I am suggesting is that every instance of human conflict that we blame on wrongful intent can instead be understood more effectively in terms of the organizational dynamics of interpersonal cognition. Our greatest struggle is finding a way to integrate alien worldviews without our own without falling into the trap of attributing the rift to ‘wrongful motives’.

Well, when you're a part of the world, you're not waiting for it in any sense. Nor do you create it. You live in it. — Ciceronianus

If you are an objective realist , you wait for it. You stare at it as if it were separate from you. Every moment of living in a world consists of co-inventing it.

there is something else: the world apart from my systems of understanding DOES this. — Constance

The question is what exactly it is doing. Or , from my vantage, how consequential is its effect. That leads back to how much we are trying pack into the idea of irreducible quality, value, feeling, substance. The more formidable we make the content of this black box , the more we are forced to found the world on forces of
evil and violence. This polarization of the world is a direct result of failing to reduce the basis of quality-value thoroughly enough. I believe we can reduce it to the point where we discover that good and bad are derivations of simple presence and absence. What it is that is present or absent is irrelevant to the meaning of good and bad. One would then say that the direction of the good is the world coming to know itself more and and more intimately, in a kind of condensation or invagination. Goodness is then a correlate of the ‘density’ of the presenting of presence in the flow of time.

This view explains concepts like evil, violence, god and polarization as derivatives of a more originary dynamic that is not itself any of these.

Or is qualia just a throwaway term for the throwaway notions of people who do not know what they're talking about? Clarity? Anyone? — tim wood

I agree with you, but no less a leading light than Galen Strawson seems to support it , so I guess there at least a few solid arguments being put forth in its behalf.

The burning sensation qua burning sensation is not a contingent "bad', for there is no way to contextualize it that would diminish its badness. — Constance

There are all sorts of ways to contextualize it that would diminish its badness. Neurospsychologically speaking, the sensation itself always emerges as what it is out of a contextual field. Any alteration in that field changes the perceived nature of the sensation. This is how accupuncture , phantom limb pain and biofeedback work, and why the concept of qualia is incoherent. There is no such thing as an intrinsic sensation

Chaos and confusion are, well, bad. Why? — Constance

Because it is not the content of events which dictates value, but the organizational relationship between events and our construal of events. If we could see that events are nearly content-free, then all that determines value, sense and meaning is how effectively we assimilate events along dimensions of similarity and likeness with respect our our previous experience.
When we attribute ‘fat’ qualitative content to the world, then suddenly it seems that anticipatory sense making must be tied to some originating valuative content ( the goodness of God). That is , we’re stuck with the question of where value comes from. What is the genesis of quality? The answer is quality is a minimal place mark just substantive enough to distinguish one event from another but not substantial
enough to generate value, feeling , goodness or badness. These are a function of assimilatory dynamics
between construer and construed.

Just wanted to be the first postmodern relativist on a thread so far composed of only objective realists. ‘Oh dear, however can we attain contact with that precious real world that we just KNOW exists around us???’

Answer: you must create that real word, not stand there waiting for it to slap you on the ass.

“The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (Nietzsche,Will to Power)

I like psychologist George Kelly’s notion of enlightenment:

“The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.”

“The more independent [reference] axes upon which we project an event the greater the psychological depth in which we see it, and the more meaningful it becomes to us.“ “Consider the coefficient of correlation between two variables. If that coefficient is anything but zero and if it expresses a linear relationship, then an infinite increase in the variance of one of the variables will cause the coefficient to approach unity as a limit. The magnitude of the coefficient of correlation is therefore directly proportional to the breadth of perspective in which we envision the variables whose relationship it expresses. This is basically true of all relationships within our universe.”

On the other hand, as I noted in an earlier post, I am closer to enlightenment than any of you are. — T Clark

Yes, but to be completely enlightened, you’d have to understand where the disparity between you and everyone else come from, and how to equalize it.

Begs a question, doesn't it?" What "good" is a narrative? — Constance

Good is whatever aids sense making , and sense making is anticipative. So what is good is whatever helps us anticipate events. And what’s the purpose of anticipating events? So that we will avoid being plunged into the chaos and confusion of a world which doesn’t make sense, where we do not know how to go on.

the purpose of talking about dispositions is to guide our expectations in possible future behaviors (what would happen if…), — neomac

I agree that optimizing our ability to anticipate the future behaviors of others should be the central goal of any psychological model.
The better we understand the way the other person is experiencing their world right now , the better we can anticipate what they are likely to do next. The deeper roots or genesis of a person’s moods as I described them in my previous post are not some patterns of thinking that only happened in the distant past and aren’t relevant now. They are still happening right now; they form the background context of a person’s current thinking and feeling.

When we talk about moods indeed we do not need to know the deeper roots of a given person's mood: maybe she is in a good mood because she won the lottery, or because she just came back from a successful yoga session, or because she smoked marijuana, or because her beloved one is coming back home after months of separation, or by character like Pollyanna. — neomac

We don’t have to become psychoanalysts and plumb other’s childhood experiences in order to anticipate their actions. But the more we know about their history, that is , our history with them, the better we can interpret what they are doing now and why they are doing it.

If I am good friends with the boss and have known him a long time , I don’t need to witness him having a temper tantrum in order to detect that he is in a bad mood. I may be able to recognize in even the most subtle behaviors of his that he is brooding about something, behaviors that others who do not share a history with him will be completely oblivious to. Maybe he nervously taps his finger on the desk when he is agitated, or sighs a lot , or becomes uncharacteristically quiet. I may also know that he is prone to fire people without warning when he is in such a mood, and newbies at the office will have no way of protecting themselves, since they may only be looking for overt emotional manifestations of anger. They will completely miss , or misread the signs.

If I know that someone is simply angry, I can hope to smooth down their anger by making some inoffensive and distracting playful remark, while if I know that someone is in a bad mood, I would more likely avoid such an attempt to not risk to make that person even more angry than she actually is. — neomac

What they dont know but you know, thanks to your familiarity with his personality , is that he never shows any overt emotionality when he is in his bad moods. What you also know , but they don’t , is how to make him feel better. What commonly works for most people who are feeling angry or down doesn't for him.

Knowing the reason for the mood ( winning lottery, smoking marijuana, yoga session) is useful here to the extent that we know enough about the person to fathom how the event is likely to affect them. If the boss’s dog dies the day before, and we see him agitated today , it is helpful to now whether he was profoundly attached to his pet or whether instead he didn’t care much for the dog.
If we know he will be absolutely devastated by the loss, it will make a great deal of difference in terms of our anticipation of his future behavior both inside and outside the office. Especially since, as someone who doesn’t show emotion, we would have few behavior clues about how he is feeling.

We always detect dispositions by observing some occurring behavior, indeed a behavioral pattern, yet we do not need to have personally observed those behavioral patterns that support disposition claims, someone else can have done that for us. — neomac

What if that someone doesn’t know the boss as well as you do?

I guess there are a couple of lessons here. First , that human beings are not stimulus response machines who react to events in easily generalizable ways. They react in ways that are unique to them. Second, people understands their world via stable ongoing schemes and habits. These habits can be understood as templates that they place over events to make sense of them and predict future happenings. The more effectively we understand the stable templates, habits and schemes others employ to navigate life, the better position we are to both identify their moods and to help alleviate their suffering. We could not talk about moods if there weren’t these stable themes and patterns of thinking that guide peoples’ behaviors. There would be no emotions either. We don’t get emotional over events that are of trival significance to us. They must impact us at a more superordinate level of relevance to our lives and the way we think about ourselves. In other words, emotions reveal to us the hierarchical nature of our motivations. Our day to day trivialities are guided by more superordinate goals and concerns , and it is these thematic concerns that give us moods , and when they are in crisis , they give us emotions.

Mood-claims are allowed whenever there are emotional patterns that can guide our expectations about possible future emotional reactions under certain conditions, independently from their genesis. — neomac

Your approach sounds somewhat behavioristic to me. I think you would agree that in order to make use of someone’s dispositions for the purpose of anticipating their future behavior, we have to know where to look and how to interpret what we find.


We need to consult more than just overt behavior patterns in order to understand and predict others behavior. These outward signs must be linked back to our prior history with that person to the extent that we can
do so, and that includes knowing about recent significant events in their lives,
In order to recognize anothers moods, and how they are likely to behave when in a particular mood, we must attempt to connect outward signs and gestures with underlying themes of concern that preoccupy them. We can’t know exactly what they are thinking obviously, but we can recognize that these concerns are not just random unrelated thoughts that flit across a person’s mind and then disappear. Instead , from one moment to the next , what matters to us forms an interlinked, integrated network of goals and interests that are tied together via narratives. Mood reveals this thematic continuity. There could be no moods without the stable ongoing continuity of the larger themes of concern. If one cannot see this linkage of internal scheme and outward signs , then one has to settle for the relative superficiality of behaviorist methods of observation. They do tell us something about others , but leave out much that is vital to achieving intimate anticipatory understanding of others.

Enlightenment is no different to other things people believe. It isn't something outside of people to be found in some particular way. It's just a story, like so many others we tell. — Tom Storm

Perhaps we could say that enlightenment is our directing ourselves toward the development of more and more useful narratives.

I noticed that in you comments, you do not talk about emotions, but about angry feelings and angry mood, so it’s not clear to me if you distinguish or conflate “angry emotion“, “angry feelings“ and “angry mood“. — neomac

Let me try to clarify the larger framework that is informing my categorical divisions.

The way I understand it, affect is a complex aspect of human functioning that can be divided for the sake of discussion ( but not in its actual functioning) into a cognitive and a bodily component.
As a general category of bodily processes, affect includes expressive features like physical gestures and impulses. In anger we experience an impulse to destroy or attack. Our bodies express anger with clenched fists, and with facial expressions such as gritted teeth, furrowed brows and loud vocalizations. In fear the body impels us to flee, our heart rate increases, our eyes dilate, the body shakes. Besides the expressive and motoric components of bodily affect, there are sensory aspects. I want to start with these.

Our motivational system is structured such that aversive and reinforcing sensations from the body have become built into the very fabric of thought and language. Rational, conceptual thought gets its meaning and direction from its connections with bodily felt sensations which allow us to care about what we think about.
When you read the word anger or the word fear , you are experiencing subtle body sensations which are embedded in your comprehension of the words and allow you to understand what they mean. This doesnt mean that whenever you read the word anger your fist clenches and your teeth grit, but there are incipient impulses in this direction in the background of your awareness that are activated by your comprehending the word.
More importantly, aversive and reinforcing sensations are operative in every aspect of our relationships with others, and they guide our dealings such as to motivate us to feel and thereby to act in certain ways when we are disappointed or frustrated, when we fail to predict outcomes, when something harmful to our well being is at hand.

I mentioned the expressive and gestural complements of such entities and anger and fear. These come into play to aid us in responding to situations that we already assess as detrimental, thanks to the aversive bodily sensations that are embedded into our cognitive assessment. But when do they come into play? I see the classic stereotypical behaviors we associate with anger or fear as one extreme end of a spectrum of behavior that begins at the other end with the most subtle and nuanced felt assessment of a situation as irritating in the case of anger, or slightly disturbing in the case of fear. Of course , we don’t generally use the words anger or fear until we reach that point of classic full throttled ‘emotionality’ , but I suggest that such behavior belongs to the same spectrum as annoyance, irritation, disapproval, in which the classic facial expressions and body gestures and impulses of anger are lacking. Why are they lacking? Is it because anger is a pre-wired mechanism that is simply switched on or off? Or is it that we don’t need the full-blown expressive aspects of what we call anger until a situation becomes intolerable?

So we can call one end of the anger spectrum cognitive assessment informed by sensory feeling, and the opposite end the full blown emotion of anger. But what about mood, passion and disposition ? Let’s look at your example of the employer’s ‘bad mood’.
How do they know he is in a bad mood? Well, he could have put his fist through the wall or through an employee’s face. Or he could have shouted. Or maybe he had a scowl on his face. He might have evinced none of these overt behaviors and instead talked in a calm and unemotional manner , but the content of what he said could have involved the conveyance of hostility toward an employee. But what if his employees knew him well enough to know that he was prone to sudden and brief flare-ups of temper that subsides quickly as they began? In that case, angry behaviors by themselves would not be enough for the employees to conclude that he was ina bad mood. So what differentiates the angry mood from isolated bouts of anger? You suggest disposition , but what makes someone disposed to act angrily in more than just a one-off fashion? This is where frame of mind comes into play. If the basis of classic anger is to be found d at the other end of the spectrum , in subtly felt cognitive assessments of irritation and aggravation, what turns such assessments into prolonged episodes that cause us to say that someone is in a mood? Let’s look at the kind of cogntive assessment that precedes a temper tantrum. Let’s say at the beginning of the work day the boss found out his favorite employee was stealing from him. A a result, the boss felt let down, hurt , violated, betrayed. It affected the way he looked at himself as boss. He felt his authority was threatened. After all , if he couldn’t trust his best worker , who could
he trust? As he attempted to get his work done , these feelings of threat, betrayal , breakdown of trust extended their tentacles into every aspect of his job, preventing him from concentrating. Every task he tried to focus on, every person he saw reminded him of this crisis in his personal situation. One could say that throughout the day he was disposed toward overt displays of anger. But notice how intricately connected the flare-ups are to the larger context of distressed thinking he was experiencing all day. As I said earlier, the boss’s classic ‘emotion’ of anger is made possible , framed by and belongs to the larger context of irritated thinking, which at various times becomes amplified into a thinking of absolutely intolerable violation that requires all the accoutrements of rage behavior. So I say a bad mood is characterized by a more or less continuous stream of cognitive assessments guided by aversive bodily sensations (feelings of threat, violation, disrespect, betrayal) and that at various points the cognitive assessment can conclude that the situation is intolerable and justifies a flare-up. This assessment ‘triggers’( I prefer to say , is backed up by) the classic anger behavior.

In conclusion , I would say that feeling-guided cognitive assessment is an actual state of ‘pre-emotional’ feeling , but on the same spectrum as full blown emotion. The whole spectrum of feeling intensity is involved in a mood, from subtle irritation to lunatic rage, and so actual states of feeling of various levels of intensity and behavioral expressiveness( overt emotionality) are involved throughout the duration of the mood. The most important pint is that the angry blowup is not simply reflexive behaviors. Its core is behaviors which serve a purpose , and that purpose is to aid the achievement of the cognitive goals of punishment and exacting revenge for a perceived violation and betrayal. These cognitive assessments are an integral part of the angry emotion. Take the assessment away and you dont have an emotion, merely reflexive action.

I think the matter goes here: when one simply opens one's eyes, one faced with familiarity instantly; always, already, if you like. Discover the nature of this familiarity and you will know what it is that stands between you and enlightenment.
The awful truth of this is that, this familiarity is the world, and to be enlightened, in the deepest sense of te term, one has to give up living in the world. — Constance

It is not the same form of familiarity with all objects that we encounter. Familiarity can take the form of dread, confusion , hatred or enlightenment. If we gave up living on the world we would have to give up any and all forms of familiarity , since familiarity implies world. So it’s not a question of giving up living in the world , but of how we live in it. Attaining a richly enlightened state requires utilizing all that the experience of world can provide in order to transcend the experiences of confusion, despair, chaos and hostility.

While emotions are actual mental states, moods and passions are dispositional emotional states. By passion I’m referring to e.g. love and hate, and I understand them as complex emotional dispositions revolving around a subject of interest:

the bad mood can be an occasional disposition to get easily angry, being “in the mood for love” is a disposition to enjoy flirting, romantic occasions and fantasies — neomac

Wouldnt a disposition to experience a certain mood or passion have to do with more abstract and longer range categories such as personality traits? For instance, one could say a particular individual has a temper , or is inclined toward depression. But these dispositions are not the actual experience of a mood. So and so many be predisposed to anger, but that doesn’t mean he is presently in an angry mood. Isnt that why we say that we are IN a mood , but we dont say we are in a disposition? If we are in a loving mood, we say we are on cloud nine. But if we say we are in love with someone, I think we mean that when we are with that person we frequently slip into a mood of loving feeling for them. It doesnt mean we are constantly and uninterruptedly in that mood with them.
To be in love is to experience moods of loving feeling , but it implies more than such actual moods. As you say, it is more of a disposition. Moods are something we fall into , get captured by, and snap out of. Dispositions are not.

Don’t we need to be continuously feeling the mood in order to be in it? Sufferers describe being in a depressed mood as having a pervasive orientation which distorts every aspect of their interactions with the world, like Sylvia Plath’s description of depression as like being in a bell jar everywhere she went. The lifting of the depression is the escape from an encompassing, suffocating atmosphere of thinking and feeling, not a mere change in disposition or inclination.
An angry mood is a continuous and incessant brooding over a situation. The hostile thinking is accompanied by angry feeling. The mood lasts as long as the ruminations.

Moods are states we can briefly pop out of. We say that we were in a bad mood but forgot all about it for a few moments when we were distracted by something that snapped us out of our bad state of mind. The distraction temporarily changed our mood.

Amor Fati wouldn't seem to be the most novel or revolutionary of Freddie's insights. — Ciceronianus

Yes, it could seem that way if you haven’t read much ‘Freddie’.

I am inclined to admit the logical possibility of having thoughts without emotions. — neomac

What’s the difference between a feeling (not of physical pain or pleasure) and an emotion? Are they the same ?

I follow enactivist approaches to affect:

“ According to Damasio, background feelings are ever-present, although ordinarily tacit. They serve to structure the everyday ways in which we encounter the world, the basic ways in which we find ourselves in the world “ (Ratcliffe 2002, p.298)
Damasio wrote:”. . . I am postulating another variety of feeling which I suspect preceded the others in evolution. I call it background feeling because it originates in “background” body states rather than in emotional states. It is not the Verdi of grand emotion, nor the Stravinsky of intellectualized emotion but rather a minimalist in tone and beat, the feeling of life itself,
the sense of being.”

Joshs I would be inclined to consider sadness, anxiety, trepidation , uneasiness, concern, satisfaction as emotions because they can be easily described in accordance to the definition — neomac

Can you see how we could easily parse such ‘emotions’ into subtler and subtler versions of themselves? Isnt it the case that all of our experiences are accompanied
by a feeling tone, an affective attitude, a way in which things matter to us , in which we care about the world? Isnt this caring , mattering, relevance the manifestation of feeling? And is there really any hard and fast separation between the always present feeling tone and ‘emotion’?

If the brain acts as if consciousness is not there at all, then its simply a matter of the brain naturally doing its thing and for some reason, some of the informational processing happens to pop into our conscious perception and some doesn't. — tom111

In analyses of consciousness like that of Damasio, phenomenal experience is organized in a hierarchical fashion, that is, into levels of consciousness. These levels correspond to levels of activation and complexity of brain activity. So for example, at the lowest end of the spectrum we have comatose and delirious states, and dreamless sleep , then various levels of drug or illness induced sedation. He also examines disorders of memory. The clear conclusion here is that there is a direct correlation between level of consciousness and level of brain activity. Consciousness reflects highly organized physical dynamics.

One could even speculate along the lines of Julian Jaynes and correlate development of consciousness with the historical evolution of culture.

if consciousness did indeed effect the activity of the brain, it would need some physical mechanism to do so. — tom111

Let me see if I understand what you are asking. Are you wondering whether the minutia of conscious experience have a physical correlate in brain activity that is in theory measurable?

To complete I would say that emotions require thoughts not the other way around. — neomac

How would you define feelings like sadness, anxiety, trepidation , uneasiness, concern, satisfaction? Do thoughts require feelings? Do we have feelings all the time? If emotions are more intense versions of feelings, then wouldn’t the underlying processes be the same between feelings in general and emotions in particular?

Joshs I'm not sure how you understand Heidegger''s remarks wrt what I wrote. The first observation is that H. is talking about mood, attunements, affective self-finding while I’m talking about emotions. The second observation is that I provided examples of emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise. While H., in your quotations, doesn’t give any examples to illustrate what he means by mood, attunements, affective self-finding . — neomac

I cut off the first part of the Heidegger quote:

“Yet people will reply: Who will deny us that? Attunements-joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy, anger-are, after all, something psychological, or better, psychic; they are emotional states. We can ascertain such states in ourselves and in others. We can even record how long they last, how they rise and fall, the causes which evoke and impede them. Attunements or, as one also says, 'feelings', are events occurring in a subject. Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling.”

Besides in our life there might be activities not emotionally triggering like when we are following some daily routine or chore (e.g. cooking or do shopping). — neomac

Heidegger’s point is that what we call emotions are just more intense variations in the affective attunement which grounds and orients all of our thinking. Attunements are never absent , even in the most seemingly neutral state of mind.

Sò the experience of time? As apposed to t as a magnitude on a clock or moving objects? What lies beneath objects changing, where they the phenomenologists dig? — Cartuna

Yes, it would have to begin with experience, because the phenomenologists believe a subject-independent world
is an incoherent notion.

What does it imply to make a time measurement, to state that it takes certain amount of time for some process to unfold? A time calculation counts identical instances of a meaning whose sense is kept fixed during the counting . To count is to count continuously changing instances OF something that holds itself as self-identical through a duration or extension.

Phenomenologists analyze how we construct objects as idealizations from constantly changing sense data.
These sense data can’t be said to have duration or extension, even instantaneous. This primordial time does not measure or count instances of anything.

Modern science has literally objectivized time. Time is nowadays nailed to the zillionth second, and the big bang approximated to 10exp-36 seconds. Time is the clock. A funny cyclic process we appear give high value. We have such a process on our wrist, it can be seen on thousands of places, and you can fight, save, find, or loose it. W — Cartuna

It began as objectivized with Aristotle and his equating of time with the motion of objects. Modern science hasn’t abandoned that view, merely complicated it.

What is time as a phenomenon? As used in life? — Cartuna

Phenomenologists realized that in order to get past time as motion and magnitude it was necessary to dig beneath the concept of the object as res extensa.

Temporal properties don't change, because if you haven't applied time to the different states of the same collection of particles, it aren't yet temporal properties. — Cartuna

I appreciate that you’re focusing on time as it has been treated within empirical accounts. I just wanted to mention that phenomenological philosophical models
of time are quite different from this.