Cool. Give me a minute...

If it's too long for you to read, then I can present each individual paragraph I make and we could discuss them one by one.

Nevermind...

Do you really believe that stuff?

Thoughts and emotions are very spiritual and profound things unlike sight and hearing. They are at the very core of our human existence. Sensing something good or bad would be a spiritual sense according to my spiritual analogy. — TranscendedRealms

Basically you're saying, 'pleasure is good, pain is bad, and pleasant thoughts and emotions are spiritual and profound'. Tell me if I missed anything.

Yes, it is my worldview. It is something I have learned from my own personal experience.

Some folk find eating other people to be the most desirable thing that they can think of. The notion excites these weirdos. And yet...

According to your definition, those are positive thoughts, good thoughts...

Nah. You've gone horribly wrong here...

Bald unsubstantiated assertions...

What are those?

Really really bald ones? — creativesoul

Not just unsubstantiated assertions, but bare-facedly so.

Anyway, it is amusing how you now seek to socially-frame this conversation with an emoticon response. You are telling me you felt nothing - "physiologically sensory perception" speaking. There was no heart rate acceleration, no defensive contraction of the pupils, no measurable sweating of the palms. You put on a smiling face to the world and that thought became the only detectable emotion inside your head.

Yeah, right. ;) And I would still appreciate you referencing your claims. Surely you have put some research effort into all this thought/belief jargon you've adopted?

It would be a good thought the person is having. But, from our perspective, it would be a bad thought. We would have bad thoughts about this person's good thought even though this person was having a good thought from his/her own perspective.

That which is good is so in and of itself. Kant had one thing right. The categorical imperative. However, I tend to understand it as a way to measure goodness.

Now you're ending in contradiction...

Sure, there might be things in the world that are objectively good or bad. But it is up to us whether we have good or bad thoughts in regards to these things.

That's not the full insight. I established earlier that our positive emotions are like the sense of taste in the very beginning of my logical argument. This means that if we have a good value judgment that makes us feel a positive emotion, then we are sensing something good in our lives. Therefore, our positive emotions are a sense like sight and hearing.

Go ahead and reread that post where I posted that logical argument. I have now made it much shorter into a very brief argument.

thank you, I see your point.

I'm glad you finally understand my worldview. If this worldview is true, then it could change the world because most people currently believe that it is only our value judgments themselves that allow us to perceive value in our lives. But I am saying that our emotions are like the sense of sight and that they are the only things that can allow us to see the value in our lives.

It's all quite nuanced. Interesting to me though, how you are well aware that I've adopted nothing as far as thought/belief 'jargon' goes. That's mine. Feel free to steal it. It works much better than Pierce or Pattee...

Anyway, it is amusing how you [creativesoul] now seek to socially-frame this conversation with an emoticon response. You are telling me you felt nothing - "physiologically sensory perception" speaking. There was no heart rate acceleration, no defensive contraction of the pupils, no measurable sweating of the palms. You put on a smiling face to the world and that thought became the only detectable emotion inside your head. — apokrisis

Ironically this indicates that you don't understand or appreciate the theory that you espouse. According to the theory of constructed emotion, there's no universal fingerprint (or emoticon) for an instance of emotion. Creativesoul's emotional response, in person, may well be expressed as a smile. My impression is that it would be. In any case, he's not telling you that he felt nothing. Using the emoticon is literally signifying that he felt something.

The gist of creativesoul's comments, as I interpret them, is an argument against the notion that 'emotions are a sense like sight and hearing'. For some reason you didn't see this, or perhaps you deliberately chose a different response, a response that might lead to amusing yourself.

Rather than a sense, from what I understand emotions are more like a filter for our senses, shaping and distorting our mental simulations according to its predictions and the immediate needs of our mind/body.

Yeah. A random dude on the internet who makes shit up is always going to trump the experts. Happens all the time.

If you can't place your arguments within any wider context of scholarship, then it just ain't scholarly.

According to the theory of constructed emotion... — praxis

Whose theory is this exactly? I remember you were reading some book but can't recall the author.

Using the emoticon is literally signifying that he felt something. — praxis

And you think he literally felt smug hilarity? You don't think the emoticon represented what he hoped I would think he felt, rather than what he actually felt?

So sure, he obviously felt something. And he also just as obviously reached for the standard social mask.

No harm in that. But it illustrates my argument.

The gist of creativesoul's comments, as I interpret them, is an argument against the notion that 'emotions are a sense like sight and hearing'. For some reason you didn't see this, — praxis

Alternatively, I asked him for references that might make sense of wherever he thinks he is coming from on this. I have never understood his own words.

Rather than a sense, from what I understand emotions are more like a filter for our senses, shaping and distorting our mental simulations according to its predictions and the immediate needs of our mind/body. — praxis

That too is as clear as mud when you try to parse it. Perhaps you can expand, or copy and paste some of this constructed emotion theory you have in mind?

You could always ask him...

I'm not sure what you're going on about. I like making shit up. I'm pretty good at it too. I'm not the only one. It's the quality of shit that matters. Not all people who make shit up are to be frowned upon. Not all made up shit is to be either.

Ya know, it's as I've always said apo...

You're more than welcome to show me where I go wrong. I would be more than happy to debate you in the proper forum... in the scholarly way. I'll argue in the affirmative that the attribution of meaning and the presupposition of correspondence to fact/reality are both prior to language. You've had time to prepare.

By the way...

To clear up the confusion. My reply regarding citations was driven, in part, by the recognition that apo had not been following the exchange between the OP and myself. Why ought I offer citations for an argument derived from this very thread?

That puts apo's engagement into perspective.

If you want to be taken seriously - which is what you say - then my reply is still that you have to supply references that can give context to your claims. You are making no sense to me because you are essentially speaking your own private language. Until you can point to something outside your bubble, who can really know what you are on about.

So are we pretending now that these citations exist?

Interesting projection("pretending") from one who is feigning ignorance...

Whose theory [constructed emotion] is this exactly? — apokrisis

I don't know.

I remember you were reading some book but can't recall the author. — apokrisis

Lisa Feldman Barrett

And you think he literally felt smug hilarity? — apokrisis

I imagine he may have felt somewhat irritated. Isn't that the general direction you were aiming for?

You don't think the emoticon represented what he hoped I would think he felt, rather than what he actually felt? — apokrisis

You appear to be suggesting that what he felt, assuming it was irritation, is always expressed as a something like this :( ? Really?

So sure, he obviously felt something. And he also just as obviously reached for the standard social mask. — apokrisis

It's really not obvious. Perhaps you should go back and look at it again to refresh your memory. You have to admit your one-word response of "Citations?" could be seen as a bit silly under the circumstances.

That too is as clear as mud when you try to parse it. Perhaps you can expand, or copy and paste some of this constructed emotion theory you have in mind? — apokrisis

My interest is to better understand the theory. I've found that discussing things that I don't understand in forums like this sometimes helps. Sometimes it's just ego games.

read one of his literature reviews and thought it presented a very confused picture. For me, nothing about emotion makes sense until you can clearly distinguish between a neurobiological level of evaluation - what all animal brains are set up to do - and the socially-constructed emotionality of humans, which is a cultural framing of experience. — apokrisis

Well, my memory of Cowie's stuff is he too was grappling with a similar distinction. For him, in trying to re-imagine emotion to talk computer language about it to computers and computer people, the gulf lay between contemporary human psychological talk about emotion, and how emotionality actually happens.

The hard part - to my mind - in analysing psychological talk is separating the wheat from the chaff. There is quite a lot of chaff in this field: alternative lists of emotions, differing claims about 'basic' emotions, specious little bits of research that mistake the countable for the insightful. All that.

As for the wider issues, I quite agree (before reading pages 3,4, and 5 of this thread after your post) that the Western reason/emotion distinction is part of the problem. But it is a problem for any of us as it's still twisted around inside our language and psyches.

Lisa Feldman Barrett — praxis

Thanks for that. Were you thinking she was saying something different to me?

I like the way she puts it in this interview - https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/10/15245690/how-emotions-are-made-neuroscience-lisa-feldman-barrett

Your brain is always regulating and it’s always predicting what the sensations from your body are to try to figure out how much energy to expend. When those sensations are very intense, we typically use emotion concepts to make sense of those sensory inputs. We construct emotions.

So she says biologically there are bodily sensations - what it feels like to be aroused or otherwise moved physiologically in preparation for anticipated action. And then emotion language is how we make sense of what is going on in a socially accepted fashion.

When you known an emotion concept, you can feel that emotion. In our culture we have “sadness,” in Tahitian culture they don’t have that. Instead they have a word whose closest translation would be “the kind of fatigue you feel when you have the flu.” It’s not the equivalent of sadness, that’s what they feel in situations where we would feel sad.

Here’s an example: you probably had experienced schadenfreude without knowing the word, but your brain would have to work really hard to construct those concepts and make those emotions. You would take a long time to describe it. But if you know the word, if you hear the word often, then it becomes much more automatic, just like driving a car. It gets triggered more easily and you can feel it more easily. And in fact that’s how schadenfreude feels to most Americans because they have a word they’ve used a lot. It can be conjured up very quickly.

Learning new emotions words is good because you can learn to feel more subtle emotions, and that makes you better at regulating your emotions. For example, you can learn to distinguish between distress and discomfort.

Well, my memory of Cowie's stuff is he too was grappling with a similar distinction. — mcdoodle

In this review paper, it only gets a quick mention at the end. So I didn't get the impression he was grappling with it.

In contrast to evolutionists, social constructivists emphasise the role of culture
in giving emotions their meaning and coherence (e.g. Averill, 1980; Harre, 1986).

Emotion: Concepts and Definitions, Roddy Cowie, Naomi Sussman, and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, 2011

Perceiving value in your life is not a thought form of perception (awareness) at all. Rather, it is an emotional awareness. In other words, our emotions do not have some sort of mind control effect on us where they force us to perceive, through our thinking, our lives being good or bad to us. It is purely the emotions themselves that allow us to see values in our lives. Emotions are actually a sense like sight. They allow us to see the values that things and situations hold in our lives. It is only our positive emotions that allow us to see the positive qualities of life (i.e. the good values) while it is only our negative emotions that allow us to see the negative qualities of life (i.e. the bad values). Having neither positive nor negative emotions would be no different than a blind person. No value judgment can allow this blind person to see just as how no value judgment or mindset can allow us to see the values in our lives. — TranscendedRealms

It seems to me that our emotions are the result of what we already value in our lives. To value something is to love that thing and I can only love it after it proves its value to me. I can only be angry AFTER someone has cheated me out of something I value. So it seems more that emotions are responses to things we value.

I think a more interesting question is how are we aware of our emotions. What sense do we use to be aware of them? Emotions seem to more like a tactile sensation, which explains why we use the term, "feeling" in referring to them.