Author Topic: emotions  (Read 607 times)

galumay

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emotions
« on: January 13, 2022, 03:22:03 PM »
Emotions whether things like happiness anger, fear or heuristics like confirmation bias, anchoring, recency bias, are all the result of nearly all 3m years of human evolution. Up until the last 20k years or so these instant, unthought reactions to external stimuli were critical to human survival. In every case its not difficult to imagine circumstances for humans to benefit from these reactive emotional responses.

Modern man has the great luxury of being able to 'feel' these emotional responses, and then generally NOT respond, because most human activity in the modern world has no terminal of very serious immediate consequences - eg you are not going to get eaten alive by a tiger. So we can evoke a rational response and question on first principles. Why am I feeling angry/frightened/happy, and keep questioning until we understand the original "why". We can them frame a response to the initial emotional response that is based on rational thought. We can avoid projecting our emotional response onto others with comments like, "you make me so angry" and instead own the emotion, "I feel angry" work out what has made us angry and then discuss the root cause with the other person. eg Someone says something racist that makes me angry, I can feel the anger, think about why I am feeling that way, (I believe all people should be treated with respect and dignity regardless of race), then instead of reacting with anger to the person I can explain that I found their comment racist and that I dont believe its appropriate to judge people based on their race or skin colour.

The point that its not the other person who "makes" us angry, but rather our concious or unconcious emotional reaction to them, we own the emotion, no one made us feel that way, we made ourselves feel that way. This may seem counter intuitive, but a simple example may help explain it - a person can make a comment that another responds with anger to and someone else with joy. It makes no sense that its the comment that creates the reaction or emotion if they can be diametrically opposed emotions. Case in point, someone recently commented on twitter how dangerous it was that police were using tear gas on violent insurgents. Many agreed strongly, with anger at the police behaving in this way, while others like me were very happy that they used any available force against anti social elements like these and in fact would be happy if they used more force! So half of us were angry and half happy - with the same external stimulus!

Another important distinction with emotions is to understand intuition is not impulse. So impulse is our pure emotional response, but intuition is actually the output of experience. Its when we get to know how to do something so well we can do it on auto pilot with no concious individual task solving. A good example is driving a car, when we start its a series of individual tasks and we have to think about each one, starting the car, the clutch, changing gear, the throttle, steering, indicating etc. By the time we are an experienced driver we drive by intuition, we just jump in the car and drive, without thinking about any of the individual tasks or actions. Experience = intuition. Impulse is when we take immediate action on our emotional response to something without any rational consideration.