Ron on: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 18:33 you wrote
Ron: David Swift, How would you define an emotion? DS: An emotion is a second SQL effect used for evaluation by all animals with brains. They consist of several remembered feelings that trigger a valued reflex (pain or pleasure). The simultaneous effect of the feelings and the valued reflex adds evaluative meaning to the, linked by time, direct (sensational) experience. -david swift Ron: You? use the term?"feelings" as though it holds the same biological meaning as reflex stimuli. Aren't feelings another term for emotions? DS: In common speech the words "feeling" and "emotion" are used interchangeably. It's very confusing for anyone try to parse the DQ experience. The fact is that since Plato (the dark horse of emotion) thinkers and especially scientists have ignored emotions because they were considered un-intellectual, women's blathering. It has seemed undignified to study them with any kind of serious intellectual power. RMP changed that attitude. ZAMM is the cutting edge of serious questions about the nature and role of emotions. That's why I think it was so popular: it opened the subject up for a generation of confused ,white, males like me, to study. The problem has been twofold: white males have been trained to ignore and discount emotions as unimportant and verbalization, language is proffered as the only feeling (verbal feeling) worth any attention. If you take the time to ignore words and pay some attention to your direct experience with preverbal feelings you might agree with me that emotions are a specific type, that is, each is a specific set of feelings. To see what I mean you have to think about your experience before you label it with words. How do you recognize something? Say you see an apple, one much like hundreds or thousands of other apples you've seen, how do you identify this particular thing as an apple? Plato said it first and said it best, you can't recognize a thing unless you've seen it before. You must be able to compare this one to one seen before. The only place that previously seen apple can exist and be brought out for comparison is memory. You must be able to remember at least one other experience with an apple to be able to compare the current experience with your memory. The form of that memory must be similar to the form of the current direct experience or else they couldn't be compared. The form of you current experience is a visual perception or feeling of a red round thing. You might also have the taste perception or feeling if you have taken a bite. These feelings must be compared to remembered feelings in order to ID the apple. Aside: Alexander Bain, Kant and Epicurus thought that the places of comparison were in the sense organs (eye, tongue, nose etc.) not as most others have speculated, in the brain. How are these remembered feelings produced? Since we make no effort at all to identify things at a rate of thousands per hour I can only conclude that we produce them automatically by reflex. Emotions evaluate our relationship with things and situations, but they cannot come from the object or situation itself (we often feel different emotions in the same situation), they can only be a subjective remembered response triggered by recognition. It is how you evaluate the difference between food and rocks. You recognize a situation or thing and immediately feel an emotion. Sometimes it is slight, sometimes it is dramatic, but it must be there; for as RMP has said evaluation creates the subject's awareness of the object (or situation). If we don't feel one way or another about something we don't notice it. For example the gravel drive with one dime in it or the friend in a crowd of faces. Evaluation is as necessary as time and space in our ability to make sense of the world. IMO emotions are the biological mechanism that make evaluation possible. - david swift Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
