Emotions are our master

[Peksa(FIN)]

Emotions are our master and we are humble servants to them. All things that we do can be explained through our endeavor to reach a certain emotion or to avoid another. Emotion is that very mechanism that makes the human species to work in such way as it appears.

 

What is emotion? An emotion is developed and refined stage of instinct. Instincts make a spider to weave a web, to prey insects for food and to mate. Do mammals and birds live by their instincts or by their emotions, that I do not know. I've only heard that only rabbits and humans take pleasure from sex. In any case, at least human species has developed a more complex motivator: emotion.

 

Thus humans do and aspire to things, because they believe they are going to reach some emotion. This happens either consciously or subconsciously. People, who lust for money, do so, because they believe they will achieve perhaps a sensation of greatness and a sense of safety, possibly even such that'd be permanent. People, who don't hunger for riches might already recognize in themselves that money just doesn't produce a more positive result in person's emotions.

 

This all means, that we don't yearn things, we only yearn the emotions that we believe are behind the things we desire. This is either conscious or unconscious. We are different as persons. To others, money and power really does bring great feelings. To others, life is just a struggle against negative emotions and therefore they choose to live riskfree life and make sure they pay their mortgage so they don't have to experience guilt or distress and are not too outspoken, so that they wouldn't have face challenge and through loosing, shame.

 

This means that there are no emotional and no rational people. There are just people who get the high or the pain from different things, or at least they think they do. In pursuit of happiness, those are in the strongest position, who know their own emotions. That is: what things bring positive emotions and what things negative.

[Phi for All]

This seems like a lecture. Was there anything you wished to discuss on our discussion board?

[Peksa(FIN)]

My intention was to provoke discussion by presenting my hypothesis. What I hoped to see was that someone would've started to claim that people are guided by their free will and reason.

[Sisyphus]

It is essentially true that people are motivated by desires, which by definition is some sort of pursuit of pleasure, of various degrees of abstraction. Fine. That is what "free will" is - you do something because you want to.

 

Reason, then, is a tool of desire, which through its use can affect the desires themselves, by examining consequences and habituating its more immediate desires to be in more accord with those that will lead to "better" pleasures later on. An emotional person is one whose desires and will have been little affected by use of reason.

 

But why say "emotion is master?" It's just one step in the chain of causality. Why stop there? In other words, why do we have these emotions? Some combination of nature and nurture. Where do those come from, and why do they have those effects? Genetics, natural selection, the causality of the whole universe in an unimaginably complicated system, far, far beyond any possibility for complete comprehension. To say "emotion is master" is to say that the original source for all our actions IS oneself, that we are, in a sense, in control of everything. But that's the opposite of what you meant to say, I think.

[YT2095]

I would say we`re a little more Complex than simple Pleasure/Pain Seeking/Avoiding automa.

 

I could (and have) coded such programs in an afternoon complete with beer breaks, Snacks and chatting time!

Neural Cybernetics even goes deeper than what you`ve just outlined!

 

 

Needs a Rethink IMO