Difference between thoughts and emotions?
I know thoughts are described as sudden impressions of uncertain origin that tend to be more objective and logic driven while emotions are perhaps more subjective and often add "color" to ones thoughts? Can one argue that thoughts and emotions are one and the same and can't be separated from one another like attack of the body snatchers or Spock? Emotions aren't simply markers in our stream of thoughts to add emphasis towards biological reactions to certain ideas so we can be as quick acting as needed to improve survival?
Comments (42)
thoughts are conscious and above that. slower,
On the other hand, manic episodes are characterized by intense mental and, some times, physical activity/exertion.
The knife cuts both ways.
It can cut both ways, but if it doesn't cut at least one way we'd die.
That's exactly my point. Without emotions we die. Sentimentality asides.
Yup.
I've always been puzzled as to whence the idea that Spock is "without emotion". Just because he isn't a drama queen like Kirk doesn't make him "without emotion".
Quoting TiredThinker
Perhaps separating the two is an attempt to control one with the help of the other.
When thinking dark thoughts, cheer yourself up in order to think optimistically.
Think optimistically to cheer yourself up when feeling down.
The rat would still pull the lever all day long, but if they moved the lever 6" away from the rat the rat wouldn't move at all . In fact it wouldn't even move to go eat it just sat in 1 spot with 0 motivation
Emotions (e.g. fear, joy, anger, disgust, surprise) are occurring sudden and spontaneous (non-deliberate) bodily/physiological reactions to what happens.
Thoughts can trigger emotions, but there can also be emotionless thoughts.
Quoting neomac
Heidegger writes:
âPsychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position.
Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills.
Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant. They are merely a radiance and shimmer, or else something gloomy, something hovering over emotional events. Attunements-are they not like the utterly fleeting and ungraspable shadows of clouds flitting across the landscape?â
In opposition to these assumptions, Heidegger says:
ââŚall understanding is essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself. To be
affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beingsâŚâ
âmoods âare the 'presupposition' for, and 'medium' of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a
Da-sein. Precisely because the essence of attunement consists in its being no mere side-effect, precisely because it leads us back into the grounds of our Dasein, the essence of attunement remains concealed or hidden from us; for this reason we initially grasp the essence of attunement in terms of what confronts us at first, namely the extreme tendencies of attunement, those which
irrupt then disappear. Because we take attunements in terms of their extreme manifestations, they seem to be one set of events among others, and we overlook this peculiar being attuned, the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein as such.â (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)
Quoting neomac
I cut off the first part of the Heidegger quote:
âYet people will reply: Who will deny us that? Attunements-joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy, anger-are, after all, something psychological, or better, psychic; they are emotional states. We can ascertain such states in ourselves and in others. We can even record how long they last, how they rise and fall, the causes which evoke and impede them. Attunements or, as one also says, 'feelings', are events occurring in a subject. Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling.â
Quoting neomac
Heideggerâs point is that what we call emotions are just more intense variations in the affective attunement which grounds and orients all of our thinking. Attunements are never absent , even in the most seemingly neutral state of mind.
Thoughts ( :chin: )
There appears to be a difference and going into the details requires a sincerity to the matter which, at the moment, I lack. Suffice it to say that in addition to a causal relationship between the two, there's a variety to emotion that thought doesn't possess at least with respect to body language/facial expression.
For a philosophy forum, supposedly dedicated to the cerebrum (thought), there are too many emojis appropriate only for to the limbic system (emotion).
Good, but incomplete, in that âthoughtâ is the subject in both parts of the proposition. In a discussion of differences, a congruent proposition is needed, in which the other part of the difference is the subject.
I agree thoughts and emotions are different, and I agree with your statement on thoughts. To complete, all thatâs needed is an exposition for what emotion is, along the same lines as what thought is. If that can be done, the difference between them is given.
But the onus is on you, as the thread author, to set the stage with a statement similar to the one you gave on thoughts.
How would you define feelings like sadness, anxiety, trepidation , uneasiness, concern, satisfaction? Do thoughts require feelings? Do we have feelings all the time? If emotions are more intense versions of feelings, then wouldnât the underlying processes be the same between feelings in general and emotions in particular?
There ya go. Now the parameters are set for the assertion of pros and cons.
Can you see how we could easily parse such âemotionsâ into subtler and subtler versions of themselves? Isnt it the case that all of our experiences are accompanied
by a feeling tone, an affective attitude, a way in which things matter to us , in which we care about the world? Isnt this caring , mattering, relevance the manifestation of feeling? And is there really any hard and fast separation between the always present feeling tone and âemotionâ?
BTW this possibility is also readily compatible with evolutionary and ethological considerations like: 1. emotions have been selected in the broad animal world for their âcommunicativeâ function, so their excessive subtlety may play against this ) 2. Emotions are energy consuming since they involve physical and bodily reactions, so there might be an ethological incentive to saving âemotionalâ energy where it is not needed.
Quoting neomac
Whatâs the difference between a feeling (not of physical pain or pleasure) and an emotion? Are they the same ?
I follow enactivist approaches to affect:
â According to Damasio, background feelings are ever-present, although ordinarily tacit. They serve to structure the everyday ways in which we encounter the world, the basic ways in which we find ourselves in the world â (Ratcliffe 2002, p.298)
Damasio wrote:â. . . I am postulating another variety of feeling which I suspect preceded the others in evolution. I call it background feeling because it originates in âbackgroundâ body states rather than in emotional states. It is not the Verdi of grand emotion, nor the Stravinsky of intellectualized emotion but rather a minimalist in tone and beat, the feeling of life itself,
the sense of being.â
What I would say about the concept of feeling, is that I find it more vague and general than emotion: for example, sensations (like pain) can be considered feelings as you also suggested. But I would also label emotions, moods and passions as feelings. While emotions are actual mental states, moods and passions are dispositional emotional states. By passion Iâm referring to e.g. love and hate, and I understand them as complex emotional dispositions revolving around a subject of interest: e.g. love is someoneâs disposition to feel joy when in company of the beloved one, sadness in the protracted absence of the beloved one, anger when someone mistreats the beloved one, or when the beloved one is flirting with someone else etc. While moods are emotional dispositions identifiable independently from any reference to their genesis (but still useful to guide our expectations about other peopleâs emotional patterns): e.g. the mood of a moody person is an unpredictable emotional disposition, the bad mood can be an occasional disposition to get easily angry, being âin the mood for loveâ is a disposition to enjoy flirting, romantic occasions and fantasies, being in a âgood moodâ is a pro-social or auto-affective emotional disposition (donât get easily angry, enjoy company, donât feel particularly anxious about something or to do things), etc.
Wouldnt a disposition to experience a certain mood or passion have to do with more abstract and longer range categories such as personality traits? For instance, one could say a particular individual has a temper , or is inclined toward depression. But these dispositions are not the actual experience of a mood. So and so many be predisposed to anger, but that doesnât mean he is presently in an angry mood. Isnt that why we say that we are IN a mood , but we dont say we are in a disposition? If we are in a loving mood, we say we are on cloud nine. But if we say we are in love with someone, I think we mean that when we are with that person we frequently slip into a mood of loving feeling for them. It doesnt mean we are constantly and uninterruptedly in that mood with them.
To be in love is to experience moods of loving feeling , but it implies more than such actual moods. As you say, it is more of a disposition. Moods are something we fall into , get captured by, and snap out of. Dispositions are not.
Donât we need to be continuously feeling the mood in order to be in it? Sufferers describe being in a depressed mood as having a pervasive orientation which distorts every aspect of their interactions with the world, like Sylvia Plathâs description of depression as like being in a bell jar everywhere she went. The lifting of the depression is the escape from an encompassing, suffocating atmosphere of thinking and feeling, not a mere change in disposition or inclination.
An angry mood is a continuous and incessant brooding over a situation. The hostile thinking is accompanied by angry feeling. The mood lasts as long as the ruminations.
Moods are states we can briefly pop out of. We say that we were in a bad mood but forgot all about it for a few moments when we were distracted by something that snapped us out of our bad state of mind. The distraction temporarily changed our mood.
There are 2 hints that I can get from your comments: 1. Moods and passions can be related to personality traits 2. Moods are actual states.
Let me focus on the second point and leave the first point for another occasion. First off, I noticed that in you comments, you do not talk about emotions, but about angry feelings and angry mood, so itâs not clear to me if you distinguish or conflate âangry emotionâ, âangry feelingsâ and âangry moodâ. As I said anger is for me an emotion, and my impression is that your idea of âangry feelingâ and âangry moodâ simply correspond to my idea of angry emotion (indeed also of emotions we can say they can capture us and some of them are so volatile that can quickly fade away or easy forget). The difference you seem to suggest between emotions and moods sounds more phenomenological than ontological to me: you seem to prefer to talk about âangry moodâ when an emotion or âangry feelingâ is particularly intense and/or persistent (e.g. âa continuous and incessant brooding over a situationâ). Yet you also talk about volatile moods (âMoods are states we can briefly pop out of. We say that we were in a bad mood but forgot all about it for a few momentsâ) so Iâm not sure after all if intensity/persistence are relevant in distinguishing angry emotions, angry feelings and angry moods. And if it is not that then what else?
Anyway, as I said, for me emotions and sensations are actual states, while passions and moods are dispositional states. Emotions are actual states triggered by what actually happens, while moods refer more to emotional patterns in someoneâs behavior that guide peopleâs expectations (expectations may be grounded on actual events but are directed toward possible future events). The example I have in mind is the employee who warns his/her colleague of the employerâs âbad moodâ what does the employee mean? That if the colleague runs into his employee he/she can trigger an angry emotional reaction from the boss if doesnât act enough cautiously. This kind of conditionals render the dispositional nature of moods. That is why the case of âmoodyâ persons is particularly striking since in their case the emotional pattern could mislead our expectations, in other words their emotional dispositions are less or not easily predictable.
Quoting neomac
Let me try to clarify the larger framework that is informing my categorical divisions.
The way I understand it, affect is a complex aspect of human functioning that can be divided for the sake of discussion ( but not in its actual functioning) into a cognitive and a bodily component.
As a general category of bodily processes, affect includes expressive features like physical gestures and impulses. In anger we experience an impulse to destroy or attack. Our bodies express anger with clenched fists, and with facial expressions such as gritted teeth, furrowed brows and loud vocalizations. In fear the body impels us to flee, our heart rate increases, our eyes dilate, the body shakes. Besides the expressive and motoric components of bodily affect, there are sensory aspects. I want to start with these.
Our motivational system is structured such that aversive and reinforcing sensations from the body have become built into the very fabric of thought and language. Rational, conceptual thought gets its meaning and direction from its connections with bodily felt sensations which allow us to care about what we think about.
When you read the word anger or the word fear , you are experiencing subtle body sensations which are embedded in your comprehension of the words and allow you to understand what they mean. This doesnt mean that whenever you read the word anger your fist clenches and your teeth grit, but there are incipient impulses in this direction in the background of your awareness that are activated by your comprehending the word.
More importantly, aversive and reinforcing sensations are operative in every aspect of our relationships with others, and they guide our dealings such as to motivate us to feel and thereby to act in certain ways when we are disappointed or frustrated, when we fail to predict outcomes, when something harmful to our well being is at hand.
I mentioned the expressive and gestural complements of such entities and anger and fear. These come into play to aid us in responding to situations that we already assess as detrimental, thanks to the aversive bodily sensations that are embedded into our cognitive assessment. But when do they come into play? I see the classic stereotypical behaviors we associate with anger or fear as one extreme end of a spectrum of behavior that begins at the other end with the most subtle and nuanced felt assessment of a situation as irritating in the case of anger, or slightly disturbing in the case of fear. Of course , we donât generally use the words anger or fear until we reach that point of classic full throttled âemotionalityâ , but I suggest that such behavior belongs to the same spectrum as annoyance, irritation, disapproval, in which the classic facial expressions and body gestures and impulses of anger are lacking. Why are they lacking? Is it because anger is a pre-wired mechanism that is simply switched on or off? Or is it that we donât need the full-blown expressive aspects of what we call anger until a situation becomes intolerable?
So we can call one end of the anger spectrum cognitive assessment informed by sensory feeling, and the opposite end the full blown emotion of anger. But what about mood, passion and disposition ? Letâs look at your example of the employerâs âbad moodâ.
How do they know he is in a bad mood? Well, he could have put his fist through the wall or through an employeeâs face. Or he could have shouted. Or maybe he had a scowl on his face. He might have evinced none of these overt behaviors and instead talked in a calm and unemotional manner , but the content of what he said could have involved the conveyance of hostility toward an employee. But what if his employees knew him well enough to know that he was prone to sudden and brief flare-ups of temper that subsides quickly as they began? In that case, angry behaviors by themselves would not be enough for the employees to conclude that he was ina bad mood. So what differentiates the angry mood from isolated bouts of anger? You suggest disposition , but what makes someone disposed to act angrily in more than just a one-off fashion? This is where frame of mind comes into play. If the basis of classic anger is to be found d at the other end of the spectrum , in subtly felt cognitive assessments of irritation and aggravation, what turns such assessments into prolonged episodes that cause us to say that someone is in a mood? Letâs look at the kind of cogntive assessment that precedes a temper tantrum. Letâs say at the beginning of the work day the boss found out his favorite employee was stealing from him. A a result, the boss felt let down, hurt , violated, betrayed. It affected the way he looked at himself as boss. He felt his authority was threatened. After all , if he couldnât trust his best worker , who could
he trust? As he attempted to get his work done , these feelings of threat, betrayal , breakdown of trust extended their tentacles into every aspect of his job, preventing him from concentrating. Every task he tried to focus on, every person he saw reminded him of this crisis in his personal situation. One could say that throughout the day he was disposed toward overt displays of anger. But notice how intricately connected the flare-ups are to the larger context of distressed thinking he was experiencing all day. As I said earlier, the bossâs classic âemotionâ of anger is made possible , framed by and belongs to the larger context of irritated thinking, which at various times becomes amplified into a thinking of absolutely intolerable violation that requires all the accoutrements of rage behavior. So I say a bad mood is characterized by a more or less continuous stream of cognitive assessments guided by aversive bodily sensations (feelings of threat, violation, disrespect, betrayal) and that at various points the cognitive assessment can conclude that the situation is intolerable and justifies a flare-up. This assessment âtriggersâ( I prefer to say , is backed up by) the classic anger behavior.
In conclusion , I would say that feeling-guided cognitive assessment is an actual state of âpre-emotionalâ feeling , but on the same spectrum as full blown emotion. The whole spectrum of feeling intensity is involved in a mood, from subtle irritation to lunatic rage, and so actual states of feeling of various levels of intensity and behavioral expressiveness( overt emotionality) are involved throughout the duration of the mood. The most important pint is that the angry blowup is not simply reflexive behaviors. Its core is behaviors which serve a purpose , and that purpose is to aid the achievement of the cognitive goals of punishment and exacting revenge for a perceived violation and betrayal. These cognitive assessments are an integral part of the angry emotion. Take the assessment away and you dont have an emotion, merely reflexive action.
Anyhow, did your analysis prove that moods are not dispositions? I doubt that. You wrote: âSo what differentiates the angry mood from isolated bouts of anger? You suggest disposition , but what makes someone disposed to act angrily in more than just a one-off fashion?â. This question shows me that you admit the existence of emotional dispositions, but in order to account for moods you find it decisive to look at actual emotions (or milder/subtle actual feelings) and deeper motivations.
I think your approach is misleading on two grounds:
1. We always detect dispositions by observing some occurring behavior, indeed a behavioral pattern, yet we do not need to have personally observed those behavioral patterns that support disposition claims, someone else can have done that for us. In any case the purpose of talking about dispositions is to guide our expectations in possible future behaviors (what would happen ifâŚ), so much so that this can become a strong reason for having terms to identify those dispositions (e.g. âsolubleâ for salt). And this is precisely the role I think we give to âmoodâ-related vocabulary at least for certain emotional dispositions. If I know that someone is simply angry, I can hope to smooth down their anger by making some inoffensive and distracting playful remark, while if I know that someone is in a bad mood, I would more likely avoid such an attempt to not risk to make that person even more angry than she actually is.
2. When we talk about moods indeed we do not need to know the deeper roots of a given person's mood: maybe she is in a good mood because she won the lottery, or because she just came back from a successful yoga session, or because she smoked marijuana, or because her beloved one is coming back home after months of separation, or by character like Pollyanna. Mood-claims are allowed whenever there are emotional patterns that can guide our expectations about possible future emotional reactions under certain conditions, independently from their genesis.
Quoting neomac
I agree that optimizing our ability to anticipate the future behaviors of others should be the central goal of any psychological model.
The better we understand the way the other person is experiencing their world right now , the better we can anticipate what they are likely to do next. The deeper roots or genesis of a personâs moods as I described them in my previous post are not some patterns of thinking that only happened in the distant past and arenât relevant now. They are still happening right now; they form the background context of a personâs current thinking and feeling.
Quoting neomac
We donât have to become psychoanalysts and plumb otherâs childhood experiences in order to anticipate their actions. But the more we know about their history, that is , our history with them, the better we can interpret what they are doing now and why they are doing it.
If I am good friends with the boss and have known him a long time , I donât need to witness him having a temper tantrum in order to detect that he is in a bad mood. I may be able to recognize in even the most subtle behaviors of his that he is brooding about something, behaviors that others who do not share a history with him will be completely oblivious to. Maybe he nervously taps his finger on the desk when he is agitated, or sighs a lot , or becomes uncharacteristically quiet. I may also know that he is prone to fire people without warning when he is in such a mood, and newbies at the office will have no way of protecting themselves, since they may only be looking for overt emotional manifestations of anger. They will completely miss , or misread the signs.
Quoting neomac
What they dont know but you know, thanks to your familiarity with his personality , is that he never shows any overt emotionality when he is in his bad moods. What you also know , but they donât , is how to make him feel better. What commonly works for most people who are feeling angry or down doesn't for him.
Knowing the reason for the mood ( winning lottery, smoking marijuana, yoga session) is useful here to the extent that we know enough about the person to fathom how the event is likely to affect them. If the bossâs dog dies the day before, and we see him agitated today , it is helpful to now whether he was profoundly attached to his pet or whether instead he didnât care much for the dog.
If we know he will be absolutely devastated by the loss, it will make a great deal of difference in terms of our anticipation of his future behavior both inside and outside the office. Especially since, as someone who doesnât show emotion, we would have few behavior clues about how he is feeling.
Quoting neomac
What if that someone doesnât know the boss as well as you do?
I guess there are a couple of lessons here. First , that human beings are not stimulus response machines who react to events in easily generalizable ways. They react in ways that are unique to them. Second, people understands their world via stable ongoing schemes and habits. These habits can be understood as templates that they place over events to make sense of them and predict future happenings. The more effectively we understand the stable templates, habits and schemes others employ to navigate life, the better position we are to both identify their moods and to help alleviate their suffering. We could not talk about moods if there werenât these stable themes and patterns of thinking that guide peoplesâ behaviors. There would be no emotions either. We donât get emotional over events that are of trival significance to us. They must impact us at a more superordinate level of relevance to our lives and the way we think about ourselves. In other words, emotions reveal to us the hierarchical nature of our motivations. Our day to day trivialities are guided by more superordinate goals and concerns , and it is these thematic concerns that give us moods , and when they are in crisis , they give us emotions.
Quoting neomac
Your approach sounds somewhat behavioristic to me. I think you would agree that in order to make use of someoneâs dispositions for the purpose of anticipating their future behavior, we have to know where to look and how to interpret what we find.
We need to consult more than just overt behavior patterns in order to understand and predict others behavior. These outward signs must be linked back to our prior history with that person to the extent that we can
do so, and that includes knowing about recent significant events in their lives,
In order to recognize anothers moods, and how they are likely to behave when in a particular mood, we must attempt to connect outward signs and gestures with underlying themes of concern that preoccupy them. We canât know exactly what they are thinking obviously, but we can recognize that these concerns are not just random unrelated thoughts that flit across a personâs mind and then disappear. Instead , from one moment to the next , what matters to us forms an interlinked, integrated network of goals and interests that are tied together via narratives. Mood reveals this thematic continuity. There could be no moods without the stable ongoing continuity of the larger themes of concern. If one cannot see this linkage of internal scheme and outward signs , then one has to settle for the relative superficiality of behaviorist methods of observation. They do tell us something about others , but leave out much that is vital to achieving intimate anticipatory understanding of others.
My strong impression is that we are addressing different philosophical issues. You seem mainly concerned about what is required to have a better understanding of human behaviour [1], and in order to achieve that you are advocating for a more holistic than behaviouristic approach [2]. This concern is clearly epistemological not ontological. My issue is instead primarily ontological: in other words, Iâm discussing about what emotions or moods are. More specifically if we can understand moods as emotional dispositions. Or how we can ontologically discriminate between moods and passions, especially if we consider both emotional dispositions. And these considerations give me clues on how to deal with the epistemological concerns too: e.g. I think that the ontological analysis of moods support the idea that we can identify them successfully without any reference to background motivations or causes.
Of course your epistemological concerns too must be grounded in some ontological understanding of the subject yet your ontological/epistemological stance remains ambiguous to me. My suspect is that is because you are conflating ontological with epistemological concerns. Indeed on one side you keep admitting emotional dispositions and how important is to detect them, besides you also keep using mood-terms for discriminating actual from dispositional behavior [3]. On the other side not only you do not seem willing to acknowledge the role that mood-terms may play in discriminating actual from dispositional behavior (see your previous comment), but you seem also to suggest that emotions too can support expectations, since they can reveal motivations [4], if so then do we really need to distinguish emotions from emotional dispositions after all?
So let me ask you again:
- Do you agree that mood-terms are particularly suitable to suggest emotional dispositions (as e.g. soluble is particularly suitable to suggest the disposition of salt to dissolve in water)?
- Do you agree that in order to detect successfully someoneâs mood we do not necessarily need to know background motivations or causes that would explain that mood (as e.g. to detect that salt is soluble doesnât require any scientific knowledge of the chemistry of salt)?
[1]
The better we understand the way the other person is experiencing their world right now , the better we can anticipate what they are likely to do next.
the more we know about their history, that is , our history with them, the better we can interpret what they are doing now and why they are doing it.
What if that someone doesnât know the boss as well as you do?
The more effectively we understand the stable templates, habits and schemes others employ to navigate life, the better position we are to both identify their moods and to help alleviate their suffering.
We need to consult more than just overt behavior patterns in order to understand and predict others behavior. These outward signs must be linked back to our prior history with that person to the extent that we can do so, and that includes knowing about recent significant events in their lives.
Knowing the reason for the mood ( winning lottery, smoking marijuana, yoga session) is useful here to the extent that we know enough about the person to fathom how the event is likely to affect them.
[2]
First , that human beings are not stimulus response machines who react to events in easily generalizable ways. They react in ways that are unique to them.
If one cannot see this linkage of internal scheme and outward signs , then one has to settle for the relative superficiality of behaviorist methods of observation. They do tell us something about others , but leave out much that is vital to achieving intimate anticipatory understanding of others
[3]
I may also know that he is prone to fire people without warning when he is in such a mood, and newbies at the office will have no way of protecting themselves, since they may only be looking for overt emotional manifestations of anger.
In order to recognize anothers moods, and how they are likely to behave when in a particular mood, we must attempt to connect outward signs and gestures with underlying themes of concern that preoccupy them.
[4]
emotions reveal to us the hierarchical nature of our motivations.
My concern is just as ontological as yours. I am also discussing what emotions and moods are.
The âontologicalâ angle, as you put it, what something is, depends on which approach to psychology we are using. A behavioral definition of such things as moods and emotions will be different than a cognitivist or neurophysiological or embodied enactivist one. Iâm trying to find out which approach to psychology you are getting your definitions from.
Quoting neomac
Iâm not sure whatâs this means. Do you know?
Quoting neomac
If we donât have some basic knowledge of chemistry, then soluble will mean something quite rudimentary , and our predictions of the behavior of the salt in the water will be very limited. Similarly, detecting a mood requires knowing what a mood consists of , and that requires knowing a bit about the structure of someoneâs thinking, and as I already said , motivation is at the very center of the structure of someoneâs thinking. We donât need to know any background motivation if we want to do a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood. We will end up treating âpredisposition to emotionâ the way a person ignorant of chemistry treats solubility; in a very limited fashion with poor predictiveness.
And what we are detecting with the salt isnât a disposition, itâs an actual occurrence. The salt is dissolving before our eyes. So then we say that under a certain circumstance the salt will dissolve. If we work backward in the same way from an actual occurrence of emotion, we can look around at the circumstance surrounding the emotion. We may notice that the person said they were in a bad mood before they had the emotion. We could then surmise a correlation between their saying they were in a bad mood and the emotion that appeared.
What would help me at this point is to know if there are any particular writings-theories in psychology that have inspired your ontological descriptions of passion, mood, emotion and disposition. If so, could you direct me to some authors or writings? I would help me understand better what you are getting at and why it seems important to you.
By âyou are conflating ontological with epistemological concernsâ, I simply meant that some of your comments sounded as objections to my views on the ontology of emotions and moods but the main arguments you provided were all about the epistemology of emotions and moods (how to better understand human behavior). To say that moods are emotional dispositional states and emotions are actual states is compatible with both behavioristic and holistic approaches to understanding the emotional life of human beings. So I didnât understand why you were repeatedly bringing up this issue.
> A behavioral definition of such things as moods and emotions will be different than a cognitivist or neurophysiological or embodied enactivist one. Iâm trying to find out which approach to psychology you are getting your definitions from.
Mine are ontological considerations that are not inspired by any of those scientific approaches or research programs you mentioned. However if you think that any among them could object to my understanding of moods as emotional dispositional states and emotions as actual states, I would like to hear which one and why.
> Soluble means salt will definitely dissolve in water. Bad mood doesnât mean a person will definitely get angry.
Agreed, but that wouldnât prove yet that moods are not dispositions, maybe would only prove that the dispositions of salt to dissolve in water are nomological and simple, while the dispositions of a person in bad mood are either nomological but hugely more complicated that the case of salt, or simply irreducible to nomological regularities.
> If calling mood an emotional disposition just means that in a given mood the chances of having a certain emotion are more probable than when not in that mood, then I agree. But this doesnât seem very interesting to me if thatâs all youâre trying to say.
Yes thatâs all Iâm trying to say. Even if it is not very interesting to you, we better agree on some background definitions before proceeding further.
> We donât need to know any background motivation if we want to do a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood. We will end up treating âpredisposition to emotionâ the way a person ignorant of chemistry treats solubility; in a very limited fashion with poor predictiveness.
Talking of âpsychological acumenâ was a quick way for me to show that I have no problems to admit different degrees of understanding emotions (and therefore also moods as emotional dispositions). So I have no doubts that having a background personal knowledge of motivations, characters, biographical episodes of someoneâs life, or a background knowledge of human psychology as wise old men, priests, doctors, psychologists, and writers seem equipped with would boost our predictive capacity in deciphering human emotional life. But I wouldnât be so dismissive even with rudimentary emotional assessments because their relevance and effectiveness may also depend on the social context: often to have a better understanding of the emotional life of an employer is not only practically unattainable but also unnecessary to correctly understand if it is the right moment e.g. to ask for a pay rise. In other words, often even âa lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting moodâ is good enough to navigate smoothly through many ordinary social interactions.
> What would help me at this point is to know if there are any particular writings-theories in psychology that have inspired your ontological descriptions of passion, mood, emotion and disposition.
Mine is just a philosophical exercise certainly inspired by what I read, but in a very broad sense: indeed I canât point you to any specific author or text (FYI for quite a while I read just Heidegger, but it was long time ago). Besides I do not have any special interest in psychology, indeed my knowledge of the psychological literature is certainly very poor, not up-to-date and almost totally forgotten.
I agree. I suppose Iâm biased by my background in theoretical psychology toward more complex assessments of personality. Thatâs particularly useful for psychotherapeutic analysis , but I can see how your perspective can be useful in industrial psychology settings.
The "happiness pie", sorry to say, is still very much governed by zero-sum game dynamics/rules. My happiness comes at the expense of yours - there are winners and where there are winners, there are losers. This, I suppose, sums up our rather disheartening predicament.
Very loosely speaking that is...Make what you want of this.
Quoting Agent Smith
Thatâs mainly the result of increases in productivity, which is made possible by improvements in technology. That, in turn, depends on scientific progress. And science doesnât operate in a cultural vacuum. Changes in scientific theory are interwoven with changes i. philosophical ideas, as well as changes in the arts, literature and political theory.
Quoting Agent Smith
The question comes down to this: is there no correlation between cultural development and personal satisfaction? Is this aspect of human nature âfixedâ?
I donât believe happiness is a competition, because our goals and ways of looking at the world differ, and happiness depends on these factors.
Some considerations here are what authors like Steven Pinker would claim to be a profound decline in overall world violence of all forms as a result of the progress of knowledge. One could liken this progress to the enlightenment that takes place as one goes from
childhood to adulthood. How many of us really would prefer to live and think as the children we were instead of the adult we are now? I think my own childhood was typical, and Iâd describe it as islands of intense but brief happiness surrounding by seas of fear.
Yuval Noah Harari says as much. In his book Sapiens he says something that rings true: science and trade are fast buddies and scientists and business people have been running the show ever since, symbiotically united as it were.
As for culture, I guess it needs to be favorable for science and trade duet. As a case in point look at the Islamic empire. It stifled the scientific community to such an extent that traders were on their own and we all know how that story ended. Europe, lagging behind up to a point, caught up and left the Islamic world in the dust.
Quoting Joshs
I was speaking from Yuval Noah Harari's perspective. He points out that back when our forebears didn't realize that we could enlarge the resource pie, one person's affluence meant another person's penury. Well, now that's history but I feel this hasn't translated into an increase in our overall happiness (depression, anxiety, mental illnesses are on the rise). To me this means happiness is still a zero-sum game as it was in the past I suppose i.e. one person's happiness is another person's sorrow. Yuval Noah Harari may need to rethink his position on economics. Something doesn't add up. Maybe happiness and money aren't linked at all. We may have erred in assuming they are.