Emotions

[Seditious]

Why? They're not proper names. Only proper names should be capitalized, and maybe the first word in every sentence (but i don't really see the point of that). And if we're going to discuss grammar and spelling then from the way you all write i could say that you've all already lost.
.

it was a playful jab in response to a playful jab, don't get all moody about something that wasn't even addressed at you. And I can't tell you 'why' the standard in English is as it is, just what it is, look it up.

'Primitive' doesn't mean "preintellectual" or "stupid", it means "from an early stage" or "basic". just thought i'd point that out.

by preintellectual or stupid I mean something which precedes rationality or reason---the intellectual forces, which emotions do not precede. If emotions are primitive then beliefs are too.

 

[Seditious]

No. What we believe/feel (whether it's permanent or temporary) strongly influences how we perceive the world as well. It goes both ways (in case it's not clear, i'm saying that in some circumstances perception is the cause of a state of mind and in other cases it's the other way around).

Examples:

Say you're convinced that everything happens for a scientific/logical reason (it's just the way you think, what makes sense to you, no "feelings" involved in the process of acquiring that "belief"). Whenever you see something (say, a butterfly's wings producing certain colors in certain patterns) you'll look at it from a scientific perspective and try to find the reason for the phenomenon (the wings of the butterfly are composed of molecules whose microscopical arrangement reflects light in certain ways which cause that particular color and that particular pattern to appear).



No[w] say you suddenly witness a close friend die at a hospital because the doctor who attended them was incompetent. From this input ("perception") your "beliefs"/"feelings" about doctors might change into negative ones.

hahaha are you suggesting 'my sadness about my friends death' rather than 'the apparent empirical data of the doctor's incompetence' is what causes me to think he's incompetent?

...what happens when I think a man I hate died because the doctor was incompetent---I guess I continue to believe he's wonderful at the art of healing???? haha


if that experience didn't change anything I believed about doctors (if I didn't generalize a belief 'since he's incompetent others might be') then I wouldn't feel any different about doctors. You have no example of feeling changing where the programming which causes emotions (beliefs) was not changed prior to the new emotional reaction

 

[Magrathean]

hahaha are you suggesting 'my sadness about my friends death' rather than 'the apparent empirical data of the doctor's incompetence' is what causes me to think he's incompetent?

...what happens when I think a man I hate died because the doctor was incompetent---I guess I continue to believe he's wonderful at the art of healing???? haha


if that experience didn't change anything I believed about doctors (if I didn't generalize a belief 'since he's incompetent others might be') then I wouldn't feel any different about doctors. You have no example of feeling changing where the programming which causes emotions (beliefs) was not changed prior to the new emotional reaction

Fine, wrong example. I'll give you one where you won't be able to say that "belief" precedes "emotion": you hear a loud sound which makes you jump and feel scared for a moment; you don't feel scared because you consciously thought "loud noises usually mean danger" before or because of any belief you might have; you're scared as an automatic reaction to hearing a loud noise all of a sudden.

 

[Seditious]

Fine, wrong example. I'll give you one where you won't be able to say that "belief" precedes "emotion": you hear a loud sound which makes you jump and feel scared for a moment; you don't feel scared because you consciously thought "loud noises usually mean danger" before or because of any belief you might have; you're scared as an automatic reaction to hearing a loud noise all of a sudden.

that reaction isn't an emotion, it's called the startle reflex.

and a little random useless trivia from Emotional Intelligence, typically, the larger the startle the more intensely the person feels upsetting emotions, so a good startle might indeed precede a good strong sense of fear, or it might be your girlfriend who sneaked up on you and now you feel the emotion of joy, but the startle itself is just a reflex, just as the gag reflex is not an emotion. while disgust is.

 

[Korona]

[...you can say that knowing snakes to be dangerous is a "belief that snakes are dangerous", but couldn't that also be called a fact? ...]
No. It is a belief. A fact would be that (some) snakes secrete a powerful poison from their fangs or that some snakes can exert an incredible amount of pressure by wrapping around their prey tighter and tighter. That snakes are dangerous is a consequence of most humans' inability to know what to do when one is near. A dog's bite can cause a lot of damage to a person, but do we consider dogs dangerous? I'm sure a mouse or a cat does, but we don't because we've spent literally thousands of years living with dogs and keeping them as pets and so we know how to treat them (yes, the domestication/devolution process has something to do with it, but not everything). But people aren't used to keeping snakes as pets, so they don't know how to treat them or what to do when they encounter one and often they act in stupid ways that end up in the snake biting them.

You seem to be suggesting a fairly narrow definition of fact, that I disagee with. I think that provided a statement is true, it can report a fact. Given it is true that snakes are dangerous (evidence is pretty easy to obtain) it seems fairly straightforward to suggest the picture of the world which paints snakes as dangerous is factual. I agree that the picture which paints (many of) them as possessing fearsome hunting abilities such as poisonous fangs or constricting ability is also factual, but it just seems pedantic to say that the statement "snakes are dangerous" isn't factual.

[...What I mean is, in what cases would it make sense to look up at a blue sky and say "I believe the sky is blue"? (...) An assertion of belief is only possible when there is ambiguity...]
In no case. It looks blue to you because light with a wavelength of around 400 nanometers is reflecting from Earth's atmosphere and getting to your eyes, but a person several hundred kilometers to the east or west sees the sky red or orange because light with a different wavelength is reaching their eyes. That the sky is blue isn't a fact; that the sky looks blue from a finite area at a particular time because blue light reflects from Earth's atmosphere in that direction is a fact.

... "in no case" was the conclusion I was hoping you would draw, although that wasn't the response I was expecting
I think a simpler way to say it would be "if I go outside and look up, whatever 'belief' I had about the sky's colour is dismissed". Simmilarly in discourse with others, maintaining a belief about the sky being a strange colour would be simply impossible without ridicule, and if maintained for long enough people would just refuse to speak to you.

The point about "the sky being blue" not being a fact simply is not true.
I don't think colour should be ruled out, simply because it depends upon a human observer (don't most 'things'?) and because in different light conditions it seems a different colour.
"snow is white" is a pretty classic example of a true statement, even though I'm sure if you shined an orange bulb onto snow it would look orange, and at night it goes black...


Now the key point is this, while it is possible to make statements sound more scientific by "removing ambiguity" (although I disagree that there ever was any ambiguity) it is unclear that these are better descriptions.
The example I am thinking of is the statement "the broom is in the corner". It is possible to analyse this statement and make it more 'prescise' by stating "the brush and the handle are in the corner". But I dont see why this is a better description.
Likewise I don't see how a statement like "Sky appears to us as the colour that is illicited by light of wavelength of around frequency ### hitting our eyes and [insert neurological story here] happening in our brains..." is better (in terms of being more true) than "sky is blue". Indeed this seems to me to be, at best, a cumbersome way of saying the same thing.

To relate this back to emotions:
There are some circumstances where "belief" is not even a factor, and yet we want to say we have emotional responses to them. At best you can say the concepts are related in some cases. They cannot be dependant.

Heck even a Dog can experience fear if you back it into a corner. Even a fish apparently gets agitated if you spear it with a hook through the mouth. Do we really want to attribute beliefs to lower life forms?

SURELY emotions are something we had looong before we evolved into rational beings capable of beliefs?

-------------

Just to set it straight, not because it has anything to do with anything said on this thread: it was more in the lines of "jews are evil because they have taken up all the job opportunities in Germany and run the country's economy even though not all of them are german" than "jews are greedy".

I don't think the two messages are contradictory - indeed Nazi propaganda was pretty thorough, they leveled just about every accusation possible against the Jews - including that they started world war two! :
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm#Antisem

 

[judas69]

its not more primitive than obsevation and belief

if you believe you see someone pull out a gun when you observe someone in a dark alley you're more likely to have that 'primitive' emotional response, but that doesn't mean emotions are stupid and preintellectual at all.

Well, I'm not quite saying that. Emotions are primitive more in the sense that they've always been closest to the animals instinctual processing and used to relay instruction to an animal when they are lacking certain reasoning ability. At it's core, it's the "here's-what-you-do-in-this-situation-if-you-don't know-what-to-do" mechanism, ..fight or flight or some variation. It's a feeling, it's not anyting "intellectual" in the sense we mean it.

As I see it, there's a difference between "intellectual processing in the formation of a belief" and "unconscious low-level processing in the formation of an observation".

If you were in the dark alley and you see a creature walking around that happens to be three times your size, you're immediate impluse as an animal, is to run like the wind, regardless if that animal has made an advance. The observation surely came first and did precede the response (clearly, you cant' react with out a reason to react) but as I see it, it surely was not a belief, a theory, in the intellectual sense. Thus, emotions, being faster (not requiring cognitive work in constructing) and implusive ..over-racting at times, are again closest to the lowest level functioning in the animal and are most primitive in it's function. Belief, is something that is created over time, on an intellectual level, upon multiple experiences of observation and ones more primitive emotional disposition, but before such does take place, the emotional end will usually fill in the gap first.

As I've said in my previous post, I believe both can be the case, ..emotion need not be directly involved in belief, and belief need not be directly involved in emotion.

 

[Seditious]

Well, I'm not quite saying that. Emotions are primitive more in the sense that they've always been closest to the animals instinctual processing and used to relay instruction to an animal when they are lacking certain reasoning ability. At it's core, it's the "here's-what-you-do-in-this-situation-if-you-don't know-what-to-do" mechanism, ..fight or flight or some variation. It's a feeling, it's not anyting "intellectual" in the sense we mean it.

As I see it, there's a difference between "intellectual processing in the formation of a belief" and "unconscious low-level processing in the formation of an observation".

"unconscious low-level processing". is often considered mastery of a task---your driving on the proper side of the road and using the clutch to the right degree is unconscious once you've mastered it, but that doesn't mean your reaction with the road and clutch came about without belief. emotion has the same. that shortcut couldn't exist without the groundwork layed, whether hardwired as in a reflex, or programmed in experience---and it should be obvious that the self-talk we can drag out of ourselves like 'hmm that snake tried to bite me, snakes try to bite things when you step on their tail' isn't the only way of thinking, and you can come to that conclusion and thus have those two beliefs about snakes which thus will have you react with fear when you see one or step on one even if you don't remember having a roundtable discussion with yourself to reach some sort of agreement on that matter. To put it in 'animal instinctual' terms, before man had a social language he was capable of putting his hand in the middle of a fire and coming to the understanding that fire hurts and thus having emotions when fire is waved in his face in the future, even though he had no language to internally dialogue his new belief.

If you were in the dark alley and you see a creature walking around that happens to be three times your size, you're immediate impluse as an animal, is to run like the wind, regardless if that animal has made an advance. The observation surely came first and did precede the response (clearly, you cant' react with out a reason to react) but as I see it, it surely was not a belief, a theory, in the intellectual sense.

why would you run from something big, be it a bear or that boulder in the tunnel in that one Indiana Jones movie... you have to believe it is a threat.

if a tree fell 40 feet away and you knew it was a tree you wouldn't go "OMFGZ SOMETHING BIG MOVED, RUN!' because your startle reflex is only to have your nervous system ready for action, fight or flight, and if you don't need to fight or run then you can stop revving up the engine, you realize you were startled but have nothing to feel an emotion about. In fact, perhaps its socially unacceptable to jump as if frightened, so you then proceed to feel an emotion of shame because your stoic friends mock you for it. Perhaps what startled you was your girlfriend jumping on your back, and after surprise you feel joy, or perhaps it was a python falling from a tree onto you, and now you feel the emotion of fear once you realize what it is, you're startled no matter what it is, but you don't have any emotion yet, but you're all juiced up ready to respond adequately thanks to your reflexes.

Thus, emotions, being faster (not requiring cognitive work in constructing) and implusive ..over-racting at times, are again closest to the lowest level functioning in the animal and are most primitive in it's function. Belief, is something that is created over time, on an intellectual level, upon multiple experiences of observation and ones more primitive emotional disposition, but before such does take place, the emotional end will usually fill in the gap first.

when I first moved into my new place one of the neighbours cats would always run off when i lept up the stairs rather fast, but after petting it a few days, having it sniff around my room, I can now do as I please and it at best raises its head for me.

If it hasn't learned something, created a belief about me, why would its behavior change when the stimulus of my movement is exactly the same? How is that explained in your belief-less model?

 

[Korona]

"Cat learns to associate your sounds with normality so percieves you as normal, rather than a new an potentially dangerous invader."
The fear - or lack thereof is just instinct, belief doesn't come into it.

Another example would be a phobia - a person can totally believe that there is nothing to fear from holding a spider, and yet be petrified of it... even a tiny one. Fears can be associated with anything, even glitter or weird stuff like that. The rational part of the brain can't "reason" the phobia away. The fact it's irrational is what makes it a phobia.

 

[Seditious]

a person can totally believe that there is nothing to fear from holding a spider, and yet be petrified of it... even a tiny one. Fears can be associated with anything, even glitter or weird stuff like that. The rational part of the brain can't "reason" the phobia away. The fact it's irrational is what makes it a phobia.

cognitive therapies get people over phobias. of course that 'its irrational is what makes it a phobia', as 'phobia' means 'irrational fear', which is why it is cured with rationality. someone corrects their irrational belief programming which has them react with fear where there is no reason to have fear, phobia is just a maladaptive mechanism which needs correction which can be done through conscious endeavor to change what has become so unconscious. Here's a nice example of it.
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=1AC995815147EF67
the association of shock/pain/loudness(/whatever you want to call that), with the white furry things is made, and thus you believe there is some correlation, "where there is this, there is that" and thus where 'this' occurs, the 'that' which we don't like we fear the occurance of---it's a belief structure, even though it's an irrational fear (a 'phobia'). The cognitive approach would be to understand why you have that response so you can understand what you're trying to achieve is possible (for if you think the response is justified you're screwed, you can only fix the problems you accept exist), and then unlearn it by exposure tasks to change your belief network through experience thus replacing the old essentially unconscious association with the new which you put their intentionally.

I'm sure there is a local psychologist you could contact for confirmation of any of this if you don't want to actually read anything.

 

[judas69]

Instinct, as a basis for emotion, is not formed (nor can be) by belief ..it's right there in the genes.

 

[Seditious]

Instinct, as a basis for emotion, is not formed (nor can be) by belief ..it's right there in the genes.

yep! that's exactly why I disagree with the answer Korona gave to the question I asked you.

 

[Korona]

You were arguing that beliefs are neseccary for emotional responses... If that is no longer your position do you want to restate it?

As for invoking classical conditioning as a counter example to my claims... I think it just reinforces what I said.
The reason I mentioned phobias is that they give an example of someone who can rationalise their emotional response all they like, such activity won't do anything to change them.

Since we are using Little Albert as an example - he can rationalise all he wants about his beliefs or whatever, and work out that feeling fear is totally irrational and all connected to being conditioned to feel fear as a child.
However despite this rationalisation (or whatever you want to call it), he is still going to feel fear when confronted with white furry objects.
We can even imagine him saying something like "I just don't understand it - I KNOW its irrational, but I just can't get over my fear of these white furry objects"
By analysing his beliefs he could get NO further than here.
Therefore a method based around belief analysis (alone) is useless as a means to overcome his fears.

The belief analysis does still serve a purpose, but only in that it can "lead the horse to water" - it can't "make it drink". To actually overcome the fear you would need to undo the conditioning, with neutral or positive association.

You could give Albert, say, 20 quid for each picture he can provide of him standing next to something white and furry. Soon he will develop a positive association with the these objects, and indeed will probably start activly seeking them out!

I don't really see where beliefs come into such deconditioning though... You can say "he now believes he will get 20 quid" but this belief does no work in overcomming the fear...

 

[Bryn]

I wish I knew what triggered ' Good Moods ', I find that I always get good moods for no reason.

 

[Seditious]

I wish I knew what triggered ' Good Moods ', I find that I always get good moods for no reason.

yea, that's been a concern of mine also, and I wonder if an answer to that might be more likely to come from the neuro-sciences more readily than from philosophy of mind.

 

[Seditious]

The reason I mentioned phobias is that they give an example of someone who can rationalise their emotional response all they like, such activity won't do anything to change them.

again, I can only suggest you speak with a psychologist if you don't understand what it is they do.

it's easy to say 'heavier than air vehicles are impossible' but since they exist you may as well look into how they work rather than saying they don't in ignorance of them.

 

[Seditious]

We can even imagine him saying something like "I just don't understand it - I KNOW its irrational, but I just can't get over my fear of these white furry objects"
By analysing his beliefs he could get NO further than here.
Therefore a method based around belief analysis (alone) is useless as a means to overcome his fears.

which is why I'm talking about cognitive therapies not psychoanalysm. he doesn't need a theory about from where it developed, he only needs to know he can change his beliefs about it and that changing his beliefs about it will change how he feels about it, he'll come to acknowledge it's no threat which is to retrain himself to not respond in the same way. and again, a lot of these methods are discussed in Goleman's Emotional Intelligence.

 

[judas69]

yea, that's been a concern of mine also, and I wonder if an answer to that might be more likely to come from the neuro-sciences more readily than from philosophy of mind.

My natural state is on the "higher side" ..if I ever did cocaine for example, it would surely kill me.

Anyway, I get the same thing from time to time.

 

[Silver Incubus]

I'm of the view that if you can't spell 'stimulus' then you probably don't know enough to talk about it.


All of you are using 'emotion' and 'belief' as two different things. Seeing as both things happen in the brain, i could argue that both are different "parts" of the same phenomenon, so to speak. Neurons fire electrochemical signals to other neurons in such a way that they create certain thoughts/ideas/emotions/beliefs; a brain's neurons are networked in a specific way that "stores" or "holds" all the emotions, beliefs, ideas and thoughts (among other things) of a person; thus, all of those are the same thing; they're all our interpretation (thanks to what i'd call 'sentience') of signals that are in the form of neurotransmitters and electricity. So whether beliefs cause emotions or emotions cause beliefs is somewhat of a futile question, in my opinion; emotions and beliefs are at the base the same thing (we can make a sort of distinction between emotions and thoughts because emotions are temporary and (in the moment they happen) stronger, but we could look at them as temporary ideas or view ideas as more-or-less-permanent emotions; ultimately, both are states of being / states of mind, nothing else), and so you're basically debating whether A causes A or A is caused by A.

First of all, I didn't realize that I was spelling it wrong, although I thought I was. SO thank you for pointing that out to me.
Secondly, if you think that by my spelling a word wrong that I don't have point, being sarcastic or not, I find it is irrelevant to those of us who find the meaning in what is being represented by the words and not how the words are represented. Obviously, you understood what I meant, so In a way, I was successful in communicating the meaning to you regardless of a spelling mistake.

Ok, a better definition of this emotion-belief situation would be to say that, first, instincts are unconscious emotional responses. Second, that it is belief in a context of what external (to the brain) stimulus creates in the body or thought, for example, pain creates a negative response sent to the brain through the nerves and therefore associates the stimulus with pain or because your context perceived through senses, so with a limited reason as a child you get scared by someone who jumps out of a closet and screams at you loudly, so a one time learning happens creating a generalization that all closets have people behind them waiting to scream at you, and all as an unconscious emotional stimulus response to closets and not the person doing it, although that may occur as well. Arachnophobia, more than likely caused by being startled and finding a spider crawling on your skin. This startled and spider movement plus any visuals are what context the fear is created in. So the response to seeing a spider, moving especially, causes feelings of being startled and crawling on skin although clearly there is no spiders actually on them. This point the persons contexts of spiders is that when they see them, they get frightened and feel the flight or fight instincts with kinesthetic hallucinations of spiders on their skin crawling on them. It is all an unconscious process created through a negative feeling experience and reaction to it. Although the context that you are much bigger then a spider, or that they are more afraid of you then you are of them, or that you can easy kill it because you are so much bigger, stronger and faster, smarter ect may be more appropriate contexts for those people with arachnophobia and if you can tell their unconscious to create a new association with spiders and other feelings that are like those in the other contexts above, then you have changed the unconscious belief that spiders have to make you feel frightened and replaced it with one of empowerment to the situation.

There are only 2 natural fears, the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling, all others are learned.

For one of the other examples of the big thing in the alley, that for me, creates a picture of me dying from that thing in the alley and that is what scares me out of there. If i thought big scary things in alleys were cute and cuddly, then I wouldn't run away nor, if I knew what it was and knew I could defeat it.

Although what I just posted is pretty much what has already been said, for some reason I couldn't read all the posts on page 1 due to some error. Sorry for any redundancy.

 

[Korona]

which is why I'm talking about cognitive therapies not psychoanalysm. he doesn't need a theory about from where it developed, he only needs to know he can change his beliefs about it and that changing his beliefs about it will change how he feels about it, he'll come to acknowledge it's no threat which is to retrain himself to not respond in the same way. and again, a lot of these methods are discussed in Goleman's Emotional Intelligence.

I don't see that belief states play a role in positive reinforcement. They can lead you to want to try it, and rationally accept that it will work, but they don't actually play a role in overcomming the irrational response itself.

"he'll come to acknowledge it's no threat which is to retrain himself to not respond in the same way."

No it's not, hence my point that Little Albert can say "I just don't understand it - I know that there's nothing to fear from white furry things but I am still afraid of them".
This is because the emotion isn't rooted in the belief, it is rooted in a conditioning. You overcome conditioning with a reverse process like positive reinforcement.
Even a psycologist, after working through the cognitive side of the fear, would almost certainly pull out a rat or whatever and get Little Albert to touch it, and praise him for doing so, so as to establish a positive association. This is the "Gestalt moment" where the rat is transmuted from something to fear into something to like.

As for Goleman - I don't understand what he thinks he has achieved, to me it sounds like an overcomplication at best involving a massivly inflated definition of what constitutes "intelligence".

 

[Seditious]

No it's not, hence my point that Little Albert can say "I just don't understand it - I know that there's nothing to fear from white furry things but I am still afraid of them".

saying you believe in god doesn't mean you really believe it, and saying you don't believe you're ugly because someone just now, once, called you pretty doesn't suddenly undo everything you believe about your looks. Nietzsche went out of his way to make that point.

I never once said 'say something and you will instantly believe it' as if you can type 'delete that virus on my computer' and the computer will just magically do it, you have to get rid of the programming in there, not just state 'I know you're in there, get out!'

I don't see that belief states play a role in positive reinforcement.

This is because the emotion isn't rooted in the belief, it is rooted in a conditioning.

You overcome conditioning with a reverse process like positive reinforcement.

what is it which is being "conditioned?"
what's being 'reinforced" if not your new belief?
(which, in the NLP definition, is a thought about a thought---if you have the concept 'rats may not be fearworthy' you can then have a thought of confirmation about that thought, which builds a belief).
You think you're just training your reflexes or something? I smile when someone says 'you're cute' not because I think it's a compliment but because I've had my smile muscles conditioned in the past? I again hear the words 'you're cute' this time not directed at me and, on your hypothesis... I just spontaneously smile like Skinner's dog salivating at any bell? lol

If everything is just a conditioning history to you (and anyone else still stuck on last century's behaviorism) then do you have beliefs about anything? the sun will rise tomorrow, you don't -believe- it, you've just had -something which isn't belief- reinforced by experience...