Anxiety is Fear
Anxiety is nothing but fear. Fear of things we can’t control. Fear of appearing a certain way to others. Fear of losing what we hold dear. Fear of the unknown.
When we feel anxiety we are on a path of fear that can lead to much greater evils. We may feel anxiety at first. Then we may try to control the fear by doing things and acting in ways that cause frustration when events don’t happen the way we thought we wanted. Then we might get angry or depressed. Anger at others or the world can lead to hate. Depression can lead to hating oneself. Hate leads to all kinds of evil acts.
So I have to tell myself when I’m feeling anxious that I’m really being afraid. I tell myself, “Don’t be afraid. Fear drives you away from God and the love you should feel for others. When you accept the world as it is presented to you without fear, then you can act with love instead of hate.”
I hope this was helpful.
When we feel anxiety we are on a path of fear that can lead to much greater evils. We may feel anxiety at first. Then we may try to control the fear by doing things and acting in ways that cause frustration when events don’t happen the way we thought we wanted. Then we might get angry or depressed. Anger at others or the world can lead to hate. Depression can lead to hating oneself. Hate leads to all kinds of evil acts.
So I have to tell myself when I’m feeling anxious that I’m really being afraid. I tell myself, “Don’t be afraid. Fear drives you away from God and the love you should feel for others. When you accept the world as it is presented to you without fear, then you can act with love instead of hate.”
I hope this was helpful.
Comments (47)
That's one of the assumptions of modern psychiatry, that a lot of mental sufferings stem from the brain alone, but I think that's a flawed way to look at things, because how we feel is impacted by our environment and not just our brain. If a wild animal is encaged and suffers as a result from chronic stress and depression, is it because there's something wrong in its brain or because it endures constraints it doesn't want to endure? We diagnose a lot of people with mental sicknesses and numb their minds with chemicals and pretend their brain was the problem instead of solving the root of their sufferings.
How you feel is always a factor of how your brain is functioning.
No one is saying that the environment doesn't have an impact on that, but that doesn't change the fact that how you feel is always a factor of how your brain is functioning.
It's just like the fact that how your car is running is a matter of how your car is functioning. We're certainly not going to ignore that environment has an impact on that, but nevertheless, how your car is running is a matter of how your car is functioning.
I specified anxiety that someone might need treatment for. Chronic anxiety/panic attacks, for example. Those can occur for no particular intentional reason.
Not all anxiety is of this type. Of course sometimes we're anxious about something very specific that we're worried about.
This is an assumption in itself, that everything we feel stems from our physical brain, that what we see through our eyes could in principle give us the whole story on what we feel and how to change what we feel. But even if that assumption were true, why would one believe that the solution to mental sufferings should be ingesting chemicals rather than changing one's environment? After all, many people are successfully treated through therapies where only words are involved, so if one assumes that the cause of mental suffering is brain malfunction then it would appear that words have the power to fix brain malfunctions, while I don't think talking to a car would fix its malfunctioning engine.
I don't think there's any assumption to it. It couldn't be clearer/more obvious.
I don't know why you were assuming I was necessarily talking about medications.
Well what you see with your eyes is one part of what you experience, what you feel is another part of what you experience, what's obvious about assuming that one part of what you can see with your eyes is the source of everything you feel?
I don't know, because I don't really have any idea what you're asking there.
I'm talking about your brain, what's obvious about assuming that your brain that you can see with your eyes (well, that you could see if you opened your skull, or that you can detect through some instrument) is the source of everything you feel?
I thought you were suggesting that seeing played some causal role in the belief.
Anyway, we have tons of data from neuroscience (both modern and historical, when it wasnt called neuroscience) of how third-person observations of brain states correlate with first-person reports of consciousness.
There is some correlation between observed electrical activity in the brain and what someone experiences, but that does not imply that all you feel stems from observable brain activity, nor that focusing on adjusting that activity is an efficient way nor the most efficient way to help someone get better. Again, if it is possible to help many people get better just by talking with them and spending time with them, with then observable results on their brain activity, then our environment and what we experience has much more influence on what we feel than it does on the functioning of a car, and then maybe the correct way to help people is precisely not to treat them as cars with a malfunctioning engine.
Yeah, it does, because ALL of the evidence we have is that mentality is brain states. There is zero evidence that it's anything else.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Also, if the brain is made solely of particles as described in the current laws of physics, it is impossible for these particles to give rise to any conscious experience, so there is more to what we feel than mere observed brain states. You use a bunch of implicit assumptions you are not aware of.
Yes it is.
The way that you tell that there's no elephant in the room you're in at the moment, for example, is by looking for an elephant. If you don't see one--absence of evidence of an elephant, then that's evidence that there's no elephant in your room. In fact, the ONLY way that you can conclude that there's no elephant in your room is via the absence of evidence of an elephant in your room. (It doesn't necessarily have to be visual evidence, but that's one thing that works.)
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is a cute bumper-sticker, and that's why people like to repeat it, but it's not sound philosophically. The only philosophical merit that slogan has is if we're talking about searching for something in an infinite domain (supposing or pretending that there are such things), wherein we have no idea where something might necessarily be or just how to check for it--in other words, it could plausibly be missing from any arbitrary location we look, or it could plausibly be undetectable per how we check, but meanwhile it could be present in any arbitrary location we haven't looked, or detectable if we were to check via some other means. That only works in an infinite domain, though, because otherwise the more we check for something in a finite domain and find no evidence of it, the better evidence we have that it just ain't there, and the bumper-sticker is not sound.
Quoting leo
That's a sentence you could write. A completely arbitrary sentence.
No it's not, all it implies is you don't see an elephant.
What you're saying is, when we hadn't observed Neptune there was evidence it didn't exist. Well, no there wasn't, there just wasn't evidence it existed.
Quoting Terrapin Station
And a sentence that makes sense. Look up the hard problem of consciousness if you want to see what I'm getting at, but if you did you wouldn't be so dismissive.
Yes it is. It's evidence that there is no elephant in the room. Elephants aren't invisible, microscopic, massless, etc. things.
Quoting leo
When we hadn't observed Neptune and there were claims about Neptune existing, then insofar as we explored those claims relative to just what the claims amounted to, and we found nothing, there indeed there would have been evidence that Neptune didn't exist.
Quoting leo
What is it with people being patronizing on this board? Sometimes this place makes other board's arrogant, partronizing @sses look like Gandhi.
Sorry, I wasn't being arrogant, I have been rejected enough in my life that when some important idea I cherish and that would make the world a better place is rejected as stupid, that truly hurts me. I felt you were trying to make me look as stupid for saying what I said, but I misinterpreted, sorry about that.
Fundamentally I'm just saying that we are more than our physical body, more than our brain, we don't see the "more" with our eyes but it's there. And then even if we find correlations between the brain we see and what we feel, that doesn't imply that the brain is the cause of what we feel, nor that what we feel cannot exist without the brain.
What I was getting at is that you'd need an argument that doesn't exist as far as I know to support "it is impossible for these particles to give rise to any conscious experience,"
Quoting leo
There's no evidence that supports any of that, though, so why would you believe it?
But precisely the argument is what some refer to as the "hard problem of consciousness".
This is how I would formulate the argument:
Premises
P1. Everything is made of elementary particles
P2. Elementary particles only have the ability to move each other
Observations
O1. The experiences of red, of a musical note, of love, of anything, are not made of particles.
O2. You can argue that the experience of red is correlated with photons of a given frequency entering the eyes, that the experience of a musical note is correlated with air molecules vibrating in your ears at a given frequency, that the experience of love is correlated with certain molecules being synthetized in your brain, but the experiences themselves are not particles.
Conclusion
C. Such particles cannot account for any conscious experience.
If particles are all there is, and if they only have the ability to move each other, there can't be conscious experience. But we have such experiences. So such particles are not all there is.
To account for the existence of such experiences we have to introduce something more, either these particles have the ability to elicit such experiences (which gives them a mystical character and not just a physical one anymore), or there is something more than these particles, or some combination of the two.
Everything we experience is the evidence that we are more than our physical body and brain seen as an ensemble of physical particles.
The argument would have to not be incredibly poor, as that premise is.
It's not as if just any arbitrary argument, no matter how ridiculous outside of formal considerations, will do.
Yet that premise is at the root of our current fundamental theories of physics, general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so on.
So you'd say that in physics, particles don't have properties, for example?
These properties only dictate how the particles move relative to each other, be it mass, charge, spin, what have you.
First off, if particles have properties, then that's something about them that's additional to the ability to move each other. (That's not the end of the problems here, but the beginning.)
When particles are in relations with other particles, so that they form atoms, molecules, etc. all the way up to things like shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, etc. they have a lot of other properties than just mass, charge, etc., don't they?
These properties have no ability other than dictating how these particles move relative to each other. Instead of saying that particles have properties, you could take each pair of elementary particles and describe how they move relative to each other, and you wouldn't even need to talk about properties, you would just have particles and how they move relative to each other.
Properties aren't the same thing as abilities. So listing abilities doesn't exhaust property-talk.
In a hypothetical universe with just one particle, say, that particle would have the properties it does, even though it would have no ability to "do anything"--there's nothing to do anything to in that universe.
That they are called properties doesn't change the fact that all they dictate is how the particles move relative to each other, you could make the whole of physics in a more cumbersome way without talking about properties, just describing how each pair of particle move each other. If instead of saying that an object accelerates at 9.8m/s² I say that the object has the property to accelerate at 9.8m/s², surely saying that it has this property doesn't say anything more than what was already described.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, the particles keep moving as described, what changes is what we perceive and what we interact with. The emergent properties are to be found within our experience rather than in the particles themselves. The very experience which mere particles moving each other cannot account for.
Why would you believe that? What led to that belief for you, in other words?
Also, do you believe that that's the standard view in physics, for example, since you were appealing to that earlier?
The standard view in physics is that for instance quarks move each other in a way that with rough instruments make us detect them as single particles such as protons and neutrons, that protons, neutrons and electrons move each other in such a way that with even rougher instruments we detect them as atoms, then with even rougher instruments as molecules, and so on. The standard view in physics surely doesn't say that an atom is anything more than the elementary particles it is made of, that a ship is anything more than the elementary particles it is made of, that a brain is anything more than the elementary particles it is made of.
If only, in my opinion, that answered either question I asked you.
That answers both with some effort. The standard view in physics is based on the two premises I stated earlier. These premises cannot possibly account for conscious experience. Yet somehow physicists believe that in principle they could explain consciousness as arising from these particles, but based on these two premises that is impossible.
So "The emergent properties are to be found within our experience rather than in the particles themselves" is my view, based on the fact that particles as described by the two premises are incompatible with conscious experience.
If you ask a physicist, they will tell you that the behavior of an atom relative to the atoms surrounding it is completely described by the behavior of the particles that compose it and the atoms around it. And then that the behavior of a ship is completely described by the behavior of the particles that compose it and that compose its environment. And that the behavior of the brain is completely described by the behavior of the particles that compose it and its environment.
Yet the behavior of these particles is merely relative motion. And the emergent properties of macroscopic things are not mere motion but something experienced, such as the wetness of water or the heat of the sun. So the experienced emergent properties are not described by the standard view in physics. The equations in the fundamental models cannot explain that water would feel wet or that the sun would feel hot, the equations only say how particles move. And they cannot explain how conscious experience would arise at all.
I'm not asking you anything about explanations about conscious experience at the moment.
Let me explain what I'm asking you better.
Okay, so let's take a rock. A rock is going to have a particular shape, size/extension, tendency to crumble or not (cohesion, brittleness, etc.), density, patterns where it might have lines/striations or "dots" of different minerals--all sort of properties, those are just a few as an example.
You don't believe that those properties are "of" the rock itself. You believe that those properties are only in our minds.
So, I'm asking you:
(1) how you came to believe that those properties are not of the rock itself, and
(2) whether you believe that the idea that those properties are not of the rock itself is the standard view of physics (and geology, etc.)
Yes okay. Actually I believe that these properties result from the interaction between the mind and the rock, I don't believe they reside solely in the mind nor in the rock. It would be quite long to explain how I have arrived at that view, I don't have much time now but will think about it later.
Regarding (2), as I described in the 3rd and 4th paragraph in my last message, I believe that fundamental physics holds the view that the behavior of a rock is completely described by the motions of the elementary particles that compose it and its environment, and as such that in principle all the properties of the rock could be derived from taking into account the motions of all these particles.
But even though the shape, tendency to crumble, density, patterns of the rock might be derived from taking into account the motions of all the particles that compose it and its environment, I hold the view that what it feels like to hold the rock in your hand couldn't be derived, and that for instance what it feels like to look at light of frequency 700 nm couldn't be derived from fundamental physics.
That's fine.. But what I'm asking you is if you think the standard view there is that those properties obtain via interaction of mind and the object.
Whatever physics thinks those properties amount to, exactly, it posits that there are such properties. Either it thinks that those properties are the result of minds and objects interacting or it does not.
That follows directly from my last message, the standard view in physics assumes that the rock's properties you described are completely described by how the particles that compose it and its environment move, and as such that these properties exist independently of the mind.
According to the standard view, the particles of the rock are arranged in such a way that they reflect light of a given frequency which appears to us as the color of the rock and which enables us to distinct the rock from its background, which gives its shape. The tendency to crumble is seen as the result of the motion of the particles within the rock which are more or less disturbed by the motion of the particles of its environment. The density of the rock is seen as the result of the motion of its particles which move downwards while the particles in water move them upwards. The patterns of the rock have again to do with the motion of its particles, which reflect photons of different frequencies and appear to us as different colors which enables us to distinct as patterns.
The standard view doesn't talk about the mind, yet the mind is involved in the act of observation. The color and shape and behavior of the rock are seen as properties of the rock, yet it is the act of observing the rock that leads us to these properties, someone who is blind would have no notion of the color of the rock, someone who has no sense of sight or hearing or sound would have no notion of the shape or patterns of the rock.
If we were all blind, we wouldn't come up with a notion of color. If you assume that color is a property of the rock, then why wouldn't we ascribe it this property if we were blind? Because we are not able to see it? But then that depends on us and our mind, not on the rock.
That's one example of observation that leads me to see that we are the ones who ascribe properties to things, based on what we are able to experience, what our mind is able to experience. That the properties we ascribe to things depends on our minds.
In the standard view these properties belong to the things, so in the standard view it is thought that if the properties of shape and density and pattern can emerge from the properties of mass and charge and spin, then potentially the property of consciousness can emerge from all that, but it is a flawed argument in that it omits the very fact that we ascribe these properties through our mind, and that without presupposing the existence of the mind we cannot possibly derive consciousness from a world devoid of consciousness, unless we ascribe to the particles the ability to elicit consciousness on top of that of causing motion. All properties are given through consciousness, and in the standard view all properties boil down to motions, but the conscious experience of red itself cannot be boiled down to motions.
The way I see it is, we have experiences, within these experiences we find regularities, we describe these regularities, but in doing so at no point do we explain how our experiences arose in the first place. If we want to claim to describe everything, then we have to account for these experiences themselves. And if we're saying that everything is particles in motion accelerating each other, then at no point can we explain how particles in motion can give rise to experience itself.
We're so used to using physics to explain what we see, that we forget that we also need to explain why we see in the first place, if we want to claim to explain everything. And to explain that we see, there needs to be something more than what we see. If there wasn't something more then we could see what others see, but we don't. If you look at me I'm not just a body that you see, because I feel and I experience, and that you don't see. And you too are more than the body others see, because you experience and you feel. And looking at your brain as closely as possible won't make us experience what you experience. We are more than just a bunch of particles with no ability other than moving each other.
So to say that particles that we imagine in our mind, and use to explain what we see through our mind, exist independently from our mind is already quite a stretch. The properties we ascribe to these particles reside in our imagination, in our thought, in our mind. The properties we ascribe to what we experience reside in our mind.
If you imagine that all these particles can do is move, accelerate each other, then how could they give rise to conscious experience at all? Sure in your imagination they can give rise to a ship and its shape and so on but how can they give rise to your experience of a ship, to you feeling what it's like to see it and touch it?
Assuming there is a world existing independently of the mind, I see everything we experience as the result of an interaction between the mind and that world, because depending on how we feel and what we believe we see the world totally differently.
That's fine, but I didn't want to read that into it without you explicitly saying so, just in case your view was otherwise.
Quoting leo
To me, this all seems like a very simple case of you confusing how we know things with what we know. Obviously we're the ones who ascribe properties to things, and we make observations, we see things, etc.--if we're putting things in bins, those things all go in the "things we do" bin; and we're not going to observe things if we don't have the ability to observe them.
But none of that implies that the properties in question are not "of" the objective stuff in question, as the standard view in the sciences has it.
Quoting leo
That makes no sense to me. It doesn't seem to follow from anything you'd said. It seems arbitrary, and I'm not sure what it's supposed to have to do with an argument about this stuff anyway. For one, "presupposing" is again in the bin of "things we do," but if we're arguing pro or con a physicalist ontology re the mind/body relationship, that doesn't have anything to do with the "things we do" bin.
Quoting leo
"Given" to what? We know about them, observe them, ascribe them, etc. through consciousness but that's the "things we do" bin. The properties themselves aren't in that bin. You're confusing how we know something with what we know about. Otherwise you'd have to explain how it's not a confusion in your view. To me, it seems like a very elementary sort of mistake.
Quoting leo
I don't think that physics per se or explanations are even pertinent to the discussion. It's not as if one thing or another is the case or not where that at all hinges on physics or explanations. Physics, per se, is again a thing that we do, and so are explanations. We're supposed to be talking about what is. Not how we know things. (Not that we can ignore how we know things, especially when there's' a dispute, but the subject matter here is supposed to be ontology (what exists, what it's "nature" is, etc.), not epistemology--now how we know what exists. There has to be something to know in order to talk about how we know it!)
Jesus I'm getting sick of that nonsense here. Why is this place infested with idealists? Is there like some idealist network where they all tell each other to talk about philosophy here?
Maybe there's another philosophy board I can spend some time on that's not infested with idealists, contintentalism fans, religious believers, etc.?
Why the hate? Do you see elementary particles with your eyes? Or do you imagine them to be here, making up what you do see? Do you see the elementary particles that supposedly make up a rock or do you see a rock?
You imagine the elementary particles, you imagine them to behave in specific ways, and through that process of imagination you can explain conveniently a lot of what you see with your eyes. Sure the mainstream scientific view is to see these particles as existing independently from us. But there is an explanatory gap between imagining these particles and saying that they exist independently from us the way we imagine them. I don't see what you don't understand about that.
Then going back to the original point, even if these particles do exist independently from us, they can't possibly explain the fact that you do see, that you do experience things, unless you ascribe to them that seemingly mystical ability to elicit qualia, which is ignored by the mainstream scientific view.
It's rather just frustration, and your comment here helps explain why. It's not as if you either directly experience elementary particles or you become an idealist. That would be quite the false dichotomy.
You seem to have a lingering hate for idealism though. I don't even consider myself as an idealist or as anything, I just follow observations and thoughts where they lead me. If you don't experience these particles then you imagine them right? You conceptualize them somehow in your mind right? Then sure, maybe these particles exist independently of you, whatever that may mean, but you can't abstract out the fact that you are involved in the act of conceptualization of these particles. You are the one making an unnecessary assumption by assuming that they exist that way independently of you, while I am making no such assumption, it is a direct observation for you that you imagine these particles rather than seeing them as you see a rock. You are the one trying to push a world view that is supported by belief rather than observation. And I think that what you call frustration stems from a fear of shaking the foundations of that world view.
In other words, it's not based solely on particles per se.
Wonderful thought here. I completely agree. Anxiety is just fear in another name, and if we do not confront or try to work through the fear the best we can, then an effortless and ignorant path one indeed goes down.