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Origin of Feeling

Tiltyred

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Probably also irrelevant to the discussion, but this makes me think about one of the last tsunamis, when the people saw the water recede ... and stood there THINKING ABOUT IT. Not realizing that the ocean was breathing, that the water was a huge inhalation, which would be followed by a huge exhalation, which meant their asses needed to find higher ground. Nobody needed to tell the animals that. So I'm not sure our anthropomorphizing non-human things and processes is so far off. It's a kind of shorthand.
 

erm

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However, the living creatures, pursue the prey consistently. Whilst the non-living do not. Rocks fall for a certain period of time, than they stop. Yet a tiger chases the prey nearly every time a tiger is observed. Therefore a tiger is related more closely to a danger than a non-living object, because a tiger acts as a danger more frequently than a rock. Or any other object that the animal tends to regard as a threat.

True, but comparable to fire and heights.

Assuming the fear was greater and more consistent around predators than non-living threats, are you claiming that projecting that fear onto non-living objects was of an evolutionary advantage, thus it increased survival if animals saw threats as living? And that if we were more focused on predators and prey, both living creatures, it would be of an advantage to see near all non-living as such. Hence anthropomorphism.

My claim, as I've already written, is that it is fear and instinct themselves that do not differentiate between living and non-living. Thus when translated into language they seem the same, causing the anthropomorphism. Our focus on living creatures causing us to describe the non-living as living most of the time for ease of understanding the patterns (probably through increased interest), thus increasing survival. Though they were often described without the similie.

If I have represented our arguments correctly, then we are essentially debating two sides of the same coin. I suppose showing a difference or lack of one between fear of the living and non-living would help seperate them.
 

SolitaryWalker

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Probably also irrelevant to the discussion, but this makes me think about one of the last tsunamis, when the people saw the water recede ... and stood there THINKING ABOUT IT. Not realizing that the ocean was breathing, that the water was a huge inhalation, which would be followed by a huge exhalation, which meant their asses needed to find higher ground. Nobody needed to tell the animals that. So I'm not sure our anthropomorphizing non-human things and processes is so far off. It's a kind of shorthand.

Its plausible to say that animals ran because they thought that the ocean was some living thing that is dangerous. This is basically Feeling or instinct, the most visceral aspect of our psyche. It is distinct in animals, but supressed by the intellect in humans.


are you claiming that projecting that fear onto non-living objects was of an evolutionary advantage, thus it increased survival if animals saw threats as living? .

Yes.



My claim, as I've already written, is that it is fear and instinct themselves that do not differentiate between living and non-living. Thus when translated into language they seem the same, causing the anthropomorphism..

Exactly true. All potential threats are treated as if they living things. The most clear idea of a threat an animal has is another animal trying to hurt them, therefore they associate all threats with that image.
 

sade

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That did not make any sense. Try again.

Too much work.
But since you asked so politely. :smile:

The fittest survives, so the ones with the most successful genes and their phenotypes survive, because the natural selection will start to eliminate the ones with less successful qualities. So saying that feeling could give an advantage in the elimination process.. Sure maybe. If it affected at the time that you suggested, which was the era when the communities had not developed much and humans were more of a prey type. The level of any other animal. I believe that was wrong. I don't believe that feeling itself would have been a bigger quality that the evolution would have favored at that point. It would've been the physical qualities and instincts that were more important. It must have existed and not been a quality of disadvantage, since it has survived to this day, but the time when it became a bigger contributor must have been later. Instincts have remained a big part of survival through out time, but feeling as in emotions and value based stuff is secondary to survival itself. I'd classify a certain intuition over things as instinct and learned info.. (Example: Bright color=poisenous, run/don't eat!!) And yes I consider the self preservation instinct a drive any animal has programmed in itself. Also I wished to show my encouoragement to Blackmail!!'s post of the instinct area and emotion area being separated in the brain.

If I was forced to pinpoint a time when feeling came to play more, I'd need to say the time when brain had developed more and social networks had become more complicated. A thing that the primitive primates have apparantly not been cabable of forming. Possibly due to the underdevelopent of the section of the brain that holds emotion.
 

redacted

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I agree, especially when it comes to anything scientific, biological, or psychological, Mr. Wing, you are so out of your element.

Anyone who is even slightly well versed in biological and evolutionary mechanisms will scoff at this thread, and you in turn.

And anyone who has a grain of social intelligence and empathy will gag and laugh at your ill conceived "theories".

I think, deep down, you have a heart and a wisdom, but you let your hate fester and manifest and lead you to believe and fortify these ludicrously delusional constructs.

If you push people away, then you will suffer the consequences, namely, a life of bitter loneliness.

Open your heart, then you will open your mind!!

:hug:

Pointlessly condescending. His essay made sense to me.

Again with the rules and the 'my way or high way approach'. The point is, when you don't speak Chinese, you don't go writing essays on how it originated and how it evolved to what it is to today. And on top of that, you don't ask the people who actually speak Chinese, to prove you wrong in eloquent English and dismiss their statements because they don't know how to use paragraphs or because their grammar sucks.

Write about what you know. It's one fo the basic rules in writing.

There is no such thing as a human that does not use Feeling.



I think BW has a good point here. Good/Bad can stem from not dangerous/dangerous.

There's also another aspect of Feeling that can be explained separately -- the social component. I think someone spoke of the Nash equilibrium before. Take the game of chicken, for example.

0=don't stop
1=stop

four possibilities (subjective value in parenthesis)
A0, B0 = both die (-10,-10)
A1, B0 = B gains pride (0,+5)
A0, B1 = A gains pride (+5,0)
A1, B1 = no game (-1,-1 -- both lose a bit of pride)

Say you're person A. You want the +5. A good strategy would be to visibly put a rock on your gas and sit in the passenger seat and lock the doors (because then the other person will know you will NOT stop, so they'll give up first). What I'm saying is, it's a good strategy to show the other person that you AREN'T rational in games like this. Anger is basically the same thing. If you get angry enough, they'll back down if they're rational.

I think a lot of emotion can be explained in game-theory terms like this, too, which isn't so much danger from the environment, but games of chicken between members of the same species.
 

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This thread premise is too fuzzy to be controversial. In truth, the belief that emotion is singularly tied to external event is...quaint.

Genetics/human biology are primarily responsible for our emotional states. As an example, Clinical Depression is a psychiatric mood disorder often earmarked by debilitating episodes of profoundly "negative" emotional event.

Serotonin functions as the primary catalyst for Clinical Depression. In the vast majority of clinical cases, our serotonin count is as a result of our inherent biological programming and is outside of our natural ability to regulate/control. (It is possible to nutritionally modify our short-term production of serotonin, but our natural levels return to normal after we stop consuming.)

Should one cite Clinical Depression as an extreme example unworthy of the OP's original claim, it seems prudent to remind the OP that the neural activity controlling all emotion is regulated by our frontal cortex. Our personal expression of emotion owes its intensity to our neurology. Period.

While it should not be ignored that external environment certainly plays a role in determining transient emotional states, it is academically imperative to remember that internal systems regulate emotion...
 

SolitaryWalker

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Too much work.
But since you asked so politely. :smile:

The fittest survives, so the ones with the most successful genes and their phenotypes survive, because the natural selection will start to eliminate the ones with less successful qualities. So saying that feeling could give an advantage in the elimination process.. Sure maybe. If it affected at the time that you suggested, which was the era when the communities had not developed much and humans were more of a prey type. The level of any other animal. I believe that was wrong. I don't believe that feeling itself would have been a bigger quality that the evolution would have favored at that point. It would've been the physical qualities and instincts that were more important. It must have existed and not been a quality of disadvantage, since it has survived to this day, but the time when it became a bigger contributor must have been later. Instincts have remained a big part of survival through out time, but feeling as in emotions and value based stuff is secondary to survival itself. I'd classify a certain intuition over things as instinct and learned info.. (Example: Bright color=poisenous, run/don't eat!!) And yes I consider the self preservation instinct a drive any animal has programmed in itself. Also I wished to show my encouoragement to Blackmail!!'s post of the instinct area and emotion area being separated in the brain.

If I was forced to pinpoint a time when feeling came to play more, I'd need to say the time when brain had developed more and social networks had become more complicated. A thing that the primitive primates have apparantly not been cabable of forming. Possibly due to the underdevelopent of the section of the brain that holds emotion.

Not all creatures are able to develop the adequate physical qualities that are necessary to survive. Being physically fit allows one to combat the predators directly and in this regard avoid being eliminated. Most creatures did not have this available to themselves, therefore they merely had to flee the danger. They have managed to flee the danger consistently and effectively by recognizing danger in as many entities as possible. In essence, they took the better safe than sorry approach by regarding all the potential dangerous things as threatening.



This thread premise is too fuzzy to be controversial. In truth, the belief that emotion is singularly tied to external event is...quaint.

Genetics/human biology are primarily responsible for our emotional states. As an example, Clinical Depression is a psychiatric mood disorder often earmarked by debilitating episodes of profoundly "negative" emotional event.

Serotonin functions as the primary catalyst for Clinical Depression. In the vast majority of clinical cases, our serotonin count is as a result of our inherent biological programming and is outside of our natural ability to regulate/control. (It is possible to nutritionally modify our short-term production of serotonin, but our natural levels return to normal after we stop consuming.)

Should one cite Clinical Depression as an extreme example unworthy of the OP's original claim, it seems prudent to remind the OP that the neural activity controlling all emotion is regulated by our frontal cortex. Our personal expression of emotion owes its intensity to our neurology. Period.

While it should not be ignored that external environment certainly plays a role in determining transient emotional states, it is academically imperative to remember that internal systems regulate emotion...


The premise is very clear. We have developed an instinct to treat all potential dangers as living threats as living threats most easily represent danger.

With that said, I see almost no relevance of your post to my premise.
 

sade

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Not all creatures are able to develop the adequate physical qualities that are necessary to survive. Being physically fit allows one to combat the predators directly and in this regard avoid being eliminated. Most creatures did not have this available to themselves, therefore they merely had to flee the danger. They have managed to flee the danger consistently and effectively by recognizing danger in as many entities as possible. In essence, they took the better safe than sorry approach by regarding all the potential dangerous things as threatening.

Maybe not the creature itself, but as a species the ones that are uncabable of creating such trates come fewer. Or unable to create a substitute by behavior using some other physical attribute to their advantage. The qualities needed in fleeing also: noticing the enemy because of wide eye range, good hearing and instincts, the speed or ways to escape etc.
And I'd like to contribute some new methods of fleeing to the development of the brain, as in intelligence in creativeness and also learned behavior from parents. Such as what's the preferred behavior pattern among the population when it comes to enemies for an example. If strange things are preferred to be avoided it could stem from lack of knowing what to do and from parental example before, self-preservation instinct kicks in and avoidance follows. Accomodation and accepting follow later by the information collected.
To the self-preservation instinct coming from Feeling, I have to say that it is programmed into us, ever since the bacteria. It is such a necessary instinct I can't see how Feeling could have been involved in the creation except on improvement level. And when it comes to animals that could've used feeling to improve it, it would make more sense that the improvement would have come on a more advanced level than at the survival.

So you believe your original timing was right? In regards of evolution and evolving, not years that is. I still think that's flawed.
 

SolitaryWalker

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To the self-preservation instinct coming from Feeling, I have to say that it is programmed into us, ever since the bacteria. It is such a necessary instinct I can't see how Feeling could have been involved in the creation except on improvement level..

Was it always programmed into us? Were all species born knowing what dangers to flee? Seems unpersuasive because if that was the case, we are without an explanaition for why we are programmed to recognize dangers in otther creatures. The most plausible explanation that I see for this phenomenon is that we recognize danger in other creatures because of our experiences with them. Or in other words, we have biologically evolved to do so. Deer learned to flee from the wolves and have developed an instinct to associate danger with the wolf. The offspring of deer as a result of this had the ability to easily recognize danger in predators. For this reason the instinct you speak of was programmed in creatures.

And when it comes to animals that could've used feeling to improve it, it would make more sense that the improvement would have come on a more advanced level than at the survival.

So you believe your original timing was right? In regards of evolution and evolving, not years that is. I still think that's flawed.

Unfortunately I do not understand what this means.
 

RaptorWizard

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RaptorWizard's responce to SolitaryWalker's Origin of Feeling thread:

SolitaryWalker defines feeling as a cognitive faculty of emotive valuation, concerned with how we relate to the external environment, not how it is, thereby rendering feeling subjective. This could cause us to attach anthropomorphic qualities to things, a personal touch. This urge likely developed within man throughout our evolution as a means of self-preservation, to identify life-threatening dangers in the external environment. As a result our feeling has become stronger.

:wizfreak:
 

KDude

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Hmm, I never noticed that I have the same expression as SW's Spinoza avatar. Am I INTP? :jew:
 

RaptorWizard

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Hmm, I never noticed that I have the same expression as SW's Spinoza avatar. Am I INTP? :jew:

:rotfl:

SolitaryWalker and his Spinoza avatar are the most true and genuine ESFJs in the infinite existence (INTPs can suck it)! :pacifier:
 
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daeames1

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I would tend to separate "emotion" from "feeling". Feeling as a mode of valuation is not emotive (in my opinion) but empathic. Whereas thinking is judgement via separation from the subject (or object) feeling is judgement via identification with the subject (or object). Another way of saying this is interior knowledge (feeling) versus exterior knowledge (thinking). One is sequential, the other holistic. Emotions are something entirely different. Some of the most "emotional" people I know (including those prone to allowing emotion to dominate their decision making capabilities) are T's. Correspondingly, some of the most analytical people I know (INFJ's for instance) are obviously F's. Strange paradoxes but it makes sense to me. Thoughts?
 

Cellmold

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Primitive method of parallel processing, like intuition.

Id say everything about us as a species is primitive. We can alter the reality around us like no other animal, but we still struggle to alter ourselves.
 
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