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
Bald unsubstantiated assertions...
What are those?
Really really bald ones? — creativesoul
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
According to the theory of constructed emotion... — praxis
Using the emoticon is literally signifying that he felt something. — praxis
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
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
Whose theory [constructed emotion] is this exactly? — apokrisis
I remember you were reading some book but can't recall the author. — apokrisis
And you think he literally felt smug hilarity? — apokrisis
You don't think the emoticon represented what he hoped I would think he felt, rather than what he actually felt? — apokrisis
So sure, he obviously felt something. And he also just as obviously reached for the standard social mask. — apokrisis
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
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
Lisa Feldman Barrett — praxis
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.
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 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
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.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
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.