Emmotions are lies

[suthers]

I was just having a shower, and as usual, thinking to much....
So I just realised that emotions are all just a product of evolution that aids social interactions (or makes them possible...) and reactions.
They have the sole purpose of allowing us to get what we want....
The realisation has kind of depressed me....
Jules

[JackScott]

Don't worry, Berkeley reckons you don't even exist. As far as depressing philosophy goes, I find that it is an interesting intellectual exercise. As far as real life goes though, I'm yet to find anything outside the areas of formal logic and ethics that I can apply to anything useful. So just ignore it, and you'll feel better.

[suthers]

Yah I think it's often a good idea to ignore some fundamental truths, to be able to maintain your sanity....
But here's a quick brake down of my thoughts on a particular emotion:
Let us take a mother's love for his child and vise-versa, an emotion that is often maintained throughout a persons lifetime....
The only reason that it exists, is that the child needs to survive to pass on it's genes to next generation, so it clings to it's mother for survival....
In return she attempts to help her child because it contains half her genes, and she 'wants' her genes to be passed....
It's not that genes are an evil force that are desperate to survive at any cost, but the ones that are best at being passed on where... so eventually it came to look like a race for genes to take over....
It sort of depressing that emotions and all forms of social interaction came about as a result of selection of the best social interactions for the genes of the person using these interactions to be passed on better....
For some reason that I can't explain though we seem to not see these things....
The only interaction I couldn't find what I would call a satisfactory explanation for was a curiosity, that most of us at this forum our a slave to (Well I know I am...)
The only reason I could find for that is it has 'the potential to bring us advantages by discovering things'...
But for three reason, that isn't a satisfactory reason:

1) It doesn't feel substantial and/or satisfactory....
2) It is very vague
3) It contains the word things

Can anybody offer up any better ideas?
There are many things also that seem to have the fundamental logic behind hidden from us and we need to perform a peace by peace logical break down of them to see the 'truth', though it is important to say that ((truth != good) && (lies != bad)), replace the != by not necessarily equal to instead of its normal syntaxial meaning...., It seems that there are certain things that have their fundamental utility and/or workings camouflaged from our eyes and for some reason seeing these things seem to disturb us....
Which is weird, because evolution tends to face things by giving us a certain (emotional) immunity to it instead of just allowing us to ignore it.... (avoiding it...)
Any answers?

Jules

P.S. Any other puzzles on the workings of social interactions/evolution?

[JackScott]

Through the discovery of new ideas and processes it (curiosity) has the potential to improve lives and increase productivity.

It's not great, but it doesn't use 'things'.

[Osbios]

Stop being depressed because you can be depressed!

Some philosophy against pure materialism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

[suthers]

It's not great, but it doesn't use 'things'.

Good point
But the one thing I have to say that is interesting about curiosity, it's that it isn't until fairly recently that development of science, fueled by curiosity has given us large amounts of advantages at a consistent rate...
Before that, it would not have been very useful to many people, in fact it could have been a disadvantage (<insert flash back from film where people are walking TOWARDS the source of danger for no apparent reason while your on your sofa screaming: "Don't do, Don't do, Don't do, you might not know what's round that corner bu why the f*** do you wan to know?, it's obviously not going to be good... hahahaha">).
So it would have been useless to many people so wouldn't of caused people to be selected out, because the people who didn't have the natural curiosity could hav just seen what the people who did where doing, if they died, don't do that, if something good happened, do do that.., meaning it had no reason to be so wide spread.... and in the amount of time that it has been that useful, evolution would not have time to act....
Jules

[Omega]

Its cool you finally realized that hope is synthetic. And, emotions didn't evolve they are with us the minute the pineal gland forms in the fetus and are slowly developed further and realized further as we form our identities around our teenage years. Plus, it isn't like the emotions in one species is somehow more advanced and greater than another's, so as if through natural selection ones emotions could evolve due to having superiority like you see in physical traits in nature such as wings for example. Emotions are the same in everyone and thing (and always have been), they cannot evolve as you think they can; it's just chemicals. Your emotions can be developed (over time), suppressed (by wisdom), or enhanced (by overreacting) which is all based on how one perceives an event. Simply, life is based on perception; it is what it is to you, but to me it may not.

PS: this post screwed me, I meant for my 100th post to be about my HDD Driver success story, so I guess my 101 post will have to be that.

[Brynet-Inc]

Do you know what's really depressing? according to several scientific sources, humanities genetic diversity is incredibly small... much more so then other species on earth.

Do you know what that means? at one point... the gene pool was reduced dramatically, there may have been as few as 1000 breeding pairs.

So brother, how are you feeling now?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catas ... y#Evidence

[Omega]

It's more like 'very distant cousin', but I am fine and you? What's even cooler is that those 1000 or so people you described all came from two people. Due to migrating to different areas of the map they were forced to adapt to climate, nutrition, and elevation changes which darkened or lightened their skin tone, changed their skull shape, body mass, etc over a very, very long time. You could call it 'evolution' but I call it adaption, because I do not believe that the body or any living thing can change without the aid of a foreign chemical or physical force (gravity, heat), so it is not as if one species can 'will' itself a pair of wings. It must be introduced either chemically or physically (perhaps a mutated set of limbs). For instance, an Indo-Iranian couple move to Russia and live out their days their having children, and their children stay and have children, and so on and so forth for many generations; I bet after a while you will simply think they are Caucasians. Due to the cold, the skin deposits whiter cells until eventually all pigment is lost and what is left is the Caucasian skin tone. So, yes at one time we were all the same color which was a redish brown tone. We originated in the Middle East and grouped up, walked/shipped out, and now here we are wondering what the hell really happened.

[~]

If emotions were false then I don't see how something that "doesn't affect your survival" should concern or affect you in any way, like losing a beloved being even when neither your life nor your genes were represented by that individual, adding the fact that you might be suffering from that fact in silence without anyone knowing and thus you wouldn't be looking for the sympathy of others for that.

[thomasloven]

Using your logic; how can you be depressed about it? Depression is a lie.
Yay for recursion.

[JackScott]

Even if it is a lie, it still exists. To be a lie, it HAS to exist.

[Omega]

Well it does affect your survival. Stress over a long period of time can actually kill a person. It can lower your appetite, lower your immune system, increase your heart rate, increase your blood pressure, etc until it kills you. It is not the emotion that you feel that is false, to you it is as real as anything else. The only false thing is how you perceive the event that caused the emotion (the chemical reaction and how you perceive it).

If it rains, perhaps to you it makes you sad, but to me it makes me happy. The same event is viewed differently, though it was the same event. As the result your health dwindles a bit and mine is enhanced. You perceived the lack of serotonin to be bad, but I enjoyed the lack thereof as I prefer to be calm, so to me this is good; let it pour.

Since our brains our simply a modulator, everything is fake. We receive electric impulses via the CNS or PNS and translate that into chemical messages, much like the computer does with electricity and binary. Then our minds ask ourselves "How did that feel?" and you reply either from experience or confusion (which is where fear is born).

Example 2, I could for a month make a bunch of mean posts all in the color red and direct them all towards you. Then one day I post a very nice message in red towards you. I bet 9 times out of 10 you will react in a defensive way, because you will have been classically conditioned to hate the color red and my use of it. You see, I could make you hate a color! Is it real, no I only made you perceive the color red as bad.

OK, so here it is summarized: Emotions are fake, what you feel is real, it is all based on perception, and the goal to life is self-actualization.

EDIT: Took out example one as I couldn't find a way to explain it better and as it was it didn't make much sense.

[Stevo14]

This is all, of course, only relevant if you actually believe in evolution (not everyone does now-a-days). I personally believe that our emotions are both an "overflow valve" for our complex minds and a "status indicator" for our general thoughts. Sort-of like what Omega said; If he posts really mean messages towards me, then my emotions will become an indicator of my thoughts (I could become angry, depressed, sad etc. depending on what my thoughts are.) If I allow it, my emotions could also hit the "overflow valve" possibly causing a flame post or some other equivalent. You can also choose to ignore your emotions, which is fine, but they will always be there if you want/need them.

Do you know what's really depressing? according to several scientific sources, humanities genetic diversity is incredibly small... much more so then other species on earth.

Do you know what that means? at one point... the gene pool was reduced dramatically, there may have been as few as 1000 breeding pairs.

Noah and his sons perhaps? Just a thought. I have never heard about scientific evidence for a reduced gene pool but when you mentioned it that was the first thing that came to mind.

[Omega]

Yeah, you could look at it that way (indicator of thought or emotional state). It's true that one could hit their max a lot sooner than normal based on how they started off perceiving the day. If it is just one thing after another then my red text could be the last straw and the conditioning would happen much faster. A fun experiment is:

01. Take koolaid powder and put it in a shallow dish.
02. Then grab a glass of water and a spoon.
03. Grab a friend and have them lick their finger.
04. Tell them to dip their finger in the shallow dish of koolaid powder.
05. Tell them to lick their finger (removing the powder).
06. Tap the glass with your spoon three to five times.
07. Have them drink from the glass.
08. Repeat 5 to 10 times.
09. Now take away the powder.
10. Tap the glass with a spoon in the same pattern as before.

Result: They should salivate due to classical conditioning.

What's this mean you say? Well, simply put it means that it isn't the emotions that make us feel, emotions are how we describe it (so they are false or imaginary like the equator), it is how we perceive the chemical messages we received which is real. Which makes hope, anger, sadness, happiness, lust, hate, jealousy, etc all fake. Think of our emotions as programs and our mind as the CPU (the bus is our PNS/CNS). The CPU receives a signal from the PNS which just perceived you receiving a strike to the head with a fist (the CNS confirmed it), so before you double fault (knocked out) the CPU triggers INT WTF and your handler loads your anger.c program which has its conditions and levels of severity and you act according to how you are currently programmed. The cool part about the mind's OS is that it can automatically reprogram itself. The bad part about the mind's OS is it's incredibly buggy.