MattMVS7

I already presented it in my opening post. Read my entire opening post and you will find it. You will also gain further insight by reading my whole opening post. As for my formula, this was it: "Positive and negative emotions are the reward wanting and liking as well as the disreward not wanting and not liking=something mattering to you=it having value from your perspective."

It wasn't a scientific formula. It was a formula based upon reasoning alone.

There are the lower, basic emotions such as a feeling of excitement from getting a new movie, feeling sexually aroused, or a feeling of panic from being in a dangerous situation. I think we call these emotions the instinctive emotions. These emotions are actually the perception of value. In other words, they are mental states where we perceive things, moments, people, and situations as beautiful, horrible, good, bad, or disgusting depending on which emotion we feel. I have come up with a formula that attempts to translate emotions into value. Our pleasant emotions are the reward wanting and liking in the brain. When you want and like something, this means it matters to you. When something matters to you, this means it is something good or bad from your perspective. Our pleasant emotions allow us to perceive things as good and beautiful while our unpleasant emotions allow us to perceive things as horrible and disgusting. Therefore, my formula that attempts to translate emotions into value would be "Positive and negative emotions are the reward wanting and liking as well as the disreward not wanting and not liking=something mattering to you=it having value from your perspective." From there, I continue to explain how our morality, character, and intellect alone cannot be any real source of value in our lives by using a hunger and thirst analogy. There is no intellectual and moral form of hunger and thirst just as how there is no intellectual and moral form of value. Value is the same thing as our instinctive emotions just as how hunger and thirst is the same thing as the feeling of needing something to eat or drink. As you can see here, I have a purely biological perspective on value. I think value is reduced to our biochemical emotions and I do not agree with the idea that we can have value in our lives through our character, deeds, intellect, morals, and obligations/responsibilities alone. One last thing. I will present the study that shows how our positive emotions are the reward wanting and liking: Quote We have found a special hedonic hotspot that is crucial for reward 'liking' and 'wanting' (and codes reward learning too). The opioid hedonic hotspot is shown in red above. It works together with another hedonic hotspot in the more famous nucleus accumbens to generate pleasure 'liking'. ‘Liking’ and ‘wanting’ food rewards: Brain substrates and roles in eating disorders Kent C. Berridge 2009 Mar 29. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717031/

Understood. Please do. I have recently modified my previous post for you to read. It clears some things up for you.

The vegetables are good for the child, but the child isn't seeing them as anything good. You could either simply acknowledge something as good or you can actually see it as something good. For example, if you were to just sit there with a completely apathetic mindset where nothing mattered to you and you just simply thought out of thin air: "Whatever. I don't want this. But this is good." Then you would not be seeing that said thing as good. But if you were to have a mindset where things mattered to you and you said: "Wow, I really want this! This is something very good!" Then you would be seeing it as something good. Therefore, in order for the vegetables to be something good (matter) to the child, then he would have to want them. Again, even if he hated them and didn't want them, then they would still be good for him. The vegetables are good for the child since they will make him grow healthy and strong. But as long as he hated them, then they would not be good to him. They wouldn't be good to him since they wouldn't matter to him. Well, actually, things can either matter to you in a positive (good) way or a negative (bad) way. If you had a completely apathetic mindset, then nothing would be good or bad to you since nothing matters to you. But if you really hated something, then it would matter to you, but would be something bad to you. So, that is how I define something either being good to you or bad to you is when it matters to you in a positive way or negative way.

Well, I am very familiar with this sort of English. I have used it my entire life and everyone understood what I was saying. Let me clarify what I mean here. When two people are having an argument, then one person might say: "You are a loathsome, spoiled brat! I am not going to talk to you any longer!" This would be the person's value judgment. He/she is seeing this other person as horrible.

I've made my point quite clear. I was talking about value judgments. When something is good to you, then you are wanting it. You are thinking something such as: "Wow, I really want this. This is something really good to me!" When that child hated the vegetables even though they were good, then they would be bad to him.

My personal insight as led me to this theory (claim). I'm not sure if there is any way to test it out, but I wish to talk about it: I am going to present to you an experiment that can prove that things that are good to us can only be things that we want. If you were to set up an experiment where you had an item that a person said that he did not want, but had to obtain anyway since obtaining it had much good value to him, then how would this person respond once you take that item away from him? I am quite sure he would want that item. Since that item was something very important (good) to him, then he wouldn't just have utter indifference towards the situation of that item being taken away from him. Let me actually clarify something here before I move on. There is the difference between conceptual values and our value judgments. For example, if there was a mother who was feeding vegetables to a little child and the mother said that these vegetables were good for him, but the child said he hated them, then these vegetables would be good and would be good for him. However, the child would not be seeing them as anything good since he hated them. This means that the vegetables would be good from a purely conceptual point of view while the child's value judgment would be a bad value judgment since he thought of them as being something bad. In order for this child to see these vegetables as being something good to him, then he would want to eat them or have them. The child cannot simply acknowledge the vegetables as having good value. He needs to actually want these vegetables in order to see them as something good. You can't have a subjective when there is an objective. That all goes back to what I said before. There is an objective form of sight which is the real sight that allows us to see objects. Therefore, you cannot have a subjective form of sight since this form of sight will not allow you to see objects. Thinking you can see when you are blind will not allow you to see objects. In that same sense, you cannot have a subjective form of wanting and liking when there is already an objective form (the positive emotions). It is only the positive emotions that can allow you to want and like things (see good value in things). Here is the objective wanting and liking:

Go ahead and move it to the Speculations section.

Many people have questions in regards to what consciousness is and what role it plays. I think a good way to answer one of these questions is by seeing how the brain responds in regards to consciousness. What I mean by this is asking people questions. For example, many altruistic people would be willing to give up their own consciousness and become biological machines if it meant helping others out more in life and accomplishing other selfless endeavors to a higher degree. However, if you were to ask a self-centered individual if he/she would be willing to give up his/her own consciousness if it meant him/her getting more of what he/she wanted in life whether it be power, fame, or success, then I bet most of these people would say they would never give up their own consciousness. They would say that they wish to enjoy their fame, power, and success and that there would be no point in them getting what they wanted if they could not enjoy it. If it's not for the enjoyment, then it would be for some type of beautiful experience such as merely being aware that he/she has those things he/she wanted in life. These people would report that there would simply be no point in them getting what they want in life as nothing more than biological machines with no inner experience. Therefore, it seems as though consciousness serves some sort of selfish purpose because those who are not selfish would be willing to give up their own consciousness for the sake of helping others as well as other selfless endeavors. However, I am going to take it a step further here. According to the materialistic worldview that skeptics hold, our selfish endeavors serve a survival purpose. They enhance our chance for survival. Therefore, according to this worldview, consciousness would have evolved to enhance our chance for survival since, according to my post, it serves a selfish purpose. But if consciousness really is about enhancing our chance for survival and nothing more, then you would not expect what it is I am about to explain. So, let me explain. If I asked one of these selfish people whether they would be willing to give up their own consciousness if it meant their own survival being enhanced exponentially somehow, then I bet they would still say that they would not give up their own consciousness. But this isn't how the brain should respond because, if being selfish is all about enhancing our survival, then these selfish people should be willing to give up their own consciousness in such a scenario. This says to me that consciousness serves a selfish purpose that transcends the mere enhancing of our survival. In other words, there is something "more" to consciousness than what the skeptics make it out to be. Lastly, what I meant by consciousness would be experience. It is our inner world of experience. Besides, if consciousness is nothing more than just knowing things, then, since knowing things enhances our chance for survival, you would expect these selfish people to give up their own consciousness in the scenario I posited in my paragraph above. Yet, they still wouldn't. I also said that consciousness serves a selfish purpose. But I am not implying that all people are selfish here. What I am saying here is that, even if you were the most altruistic person in the world, that consciousness has evolved for a selfish purpose that transcends the mere enhancing of our survival.

I'm confused here. Why did you back out of the conversation? I was addressing the life crisis situations you've described. You were not actually referring to near death experiences (i.e. the hallucinatory experiences people report such as being out of body and traveling to other realms). Therefore, that is the reason why I wasn't addressing ndes in the conversation, but was instead addressing the life or death situations you've pointed out earlier such as being bloody and almost dying as well as almost falling off a cliff. I also said that my traumatic experience was in regards to an nde. Not that I actually have had an nde myself yet.

I was actually referring to life or death situations. I was not referring to near death experiences. You are right though in saying that a near death experience could be worse than what I've already been through. However, I was instead addressing the point you've made in regards to being near death such as being bloody and dying as well as almost falling off a cliff. These experiences I have had were situational induced depression and agony. But I do not understand what you mean here when you say that I refuse to elaborate in detail. I think I already have elaborated in detail since I already explained to you what these traumatic experiences were.

Well, all I know is that life or death situations wouldn't be anywhere near as bad as what I've been through. Therefore, I can honestly conclude that these were emotionally traumatic experiences for me. It wasn't just depression I experienced from these events, but also traumatic emotional experiences as well.

These were traumatic events. Since I was in the worst emotionally traumatized state of my life in regards to both the first event I described to you and the second event, then that is the very definition of an emotionally traumatic experience. These experiences would actually be much worse than if I was in a life or death situation. In life or death situations, I would simply be very fearful and nothing more. But that would be nothing in comparison to these emotionally traumatic experiences I have had.

One was the idea of death being final. I once had a little bit of belief in the afterlife. But once I lost that belief, that has traumatized me. The other traumatic experience I have had was in regards to a horrible near death experience. I was worried (traumatized) that if I ever do have a horrible nde, that it could be just as bad or even worse than the traumatic induced nightmares I have had in the past which were far worse experiences than the trauma itself.

I have had a few severely traumatic experience in my life where I was in the worst miserable (hopeless) state of my life, but I have fully recovered from such experiences and I was wondering how the brain recovers from these experiences and that if these recovery mechanisms were somehow absent, would the brain somehow recover on its own anyway? Let's pretend that these recovery mechanisms were completely absent, then would it be no different than a situation where you are constantly running on a treadmill and you eventually reach a point of exhaustion? If you kept running on that treadmill, then you would eventually reach a point where you would completely die. I apply this analogy to traumatic experiences because I am wondering if those overly active emotionally traumatic brain regions that are constantly active 24/7 would eventually reach a point where they would become exhausted on their own and that you don't actually need any recovery mechanisms in the brain to recover from such traumatic experiences. But if you do need these recovery mechanisms and I didn't have them, then would I literally be trapped in that horrible traumatic state I was in and never reach a point of significant recovery from it? That would be the worst thing because it was a constant 24/7 hellish state of mind for me and to always be in that state would be horrible.

Because experience is everything to life. Without experience, then we would either be dead or unconscious. Therefore, in order to have value and worth in your life, then that is an experience right there. Like I said earlier, my good feelings are the only experiences that give my life a real quality of value, worth, joy, happiness, and beauty.

Again, I would need my own good feelings to give that value in the first place since my good feelings are the only things that can give me the actual awareness of beauty, joy, value, and worth just as how the experience of sight and hearing are the only experiences that can allow a person to actually be aware of visualizing objects and perceiving sound.

Please refer to my recent previous posts here because it has nothing to do with my attitude and my way of thinking. My good feelings are the only things that truly bring my life value, worth, joy, beauty, and happiness and I don't have these feelings. The only life I have to look forward to now is an eternal blissful afterlife where I can have these good feelings back to me. But I don't believe in any afterlife.

That is correct. I used to have them a while ago, but I do not and this has been an ongoing chronic condition for me.

All I am saying here is that my experience of my good feelings are the only experiences that give my life value and I don't have them. You and others might say that there are other experiences out there besides these feelings that can give my life a real quality of value, worth, joy, and beauty. But this has not been my personal experience. I am not convinced of such a claim. This all ties in with the eternal blissful afterlife since I would need that life to give my life value and worth since it would be the only life where I can have these good feelings again.

I am not seeking medical help here. I am only having a discussion regarding this topic I have made.

There is no treatment for those mental disorders since they are untreatable. I don't think there is any treatment out there either that can restore my good feelings. I don't think there is any treatment for anhedonia.

You claim it is self-centered. Well, I have been diagnosed with narcissist personality disorder and I am also a psychopath. However, I do not go around harming and torturing others since I would never do that. I am a kind and respectful person despite my disorders. Also, as I mentioned earlier, please read my previous post since it explains my whole predicament.

Read the previous post I made since it explains my predicament.