Feelings

[Carol]

I was rather disturbed by the youtube where a rat brain was used as a neural network to control a simple robot. In the actual clip I think just a few cells were used but following the theme it gets worse and worse. Once you decide something (in this case rats) has no value you're on a slippery slope - where are you going to draw the line? Does (for example) Syne have any value? I don't think it is my responsibility to choose whether or not Syne has a value. The consequence of the absence of responsibility (and the complete lack of control) is that my quality of life is mostly (99.999%) determined by things outside myself and beyond my control. With age I seem to have (almost) completely lost the interest and ability to 'look in'. There's so much fantastic stuff 'out there'. I have a pair of seagulls nesting about 10 feet from where I am now. I'm lucky but with a slice of bread you can be anywhere and get some of the best friends you're ever likely to make. There's birds on roofs and in bushes. There's probably rats most places too but I'm not going to suggest making friends with them - even though I rather like their company (my wife must never find this out though). There's beauty everywhere. The sunrise is free but you have to be up early to see it.

Confused, you have given us thoughts, but not much in the way of feelings.  How do you feel about many things being out of your control?  Have you always thought so much was out of your control?  Do you remember thinking and feeling differently?   The big question for this thread is where do you feel whatever you feel?   Are you aware of a physical feeling or is everything just thought?

Whoops I see you already answered part of my questions, but I am going to ask you think about the feelings anyway.

Intuitive indeed - so, like with eyeballs, I can see what is out there more clearly.

The OP is about feelings - emotions - a sort of internal weather. My claim (which I stand by) is that I have less internal weather than when younger and I pay less attention to the internal weather that remains. 

Sunrise has a carpe diem quality that Sunset conspicuously lacks. If you can watch the Sun rise then the rest of the day is your oyster. I generally find it is a rather hung over little oyster but I don't think that entirely detracts from the sentiment.

I have found since I have started discussing feelings, I am more aware of my feelings.  A few times I have found it interesting that I was experiencing uncomfortable feelings that I didn't want, and found that curious.  Sometimes disagreements make me enjoy a discussion even more, and sometimes a disagreement leaves me feeling very irritated.  If several people are saying I am wrong, and no one agrees with my side of an argument, I feel awful. However, if just one other person is arguing my side of the argument, I find myself enjoying the argument again.

In the past, I think I was more prone to just reacting to my feeling, instead of being curious about my feelings.  I don't think I would want to be a brain in a vat, limited to thinking, and not feeling. When you watch the sun rise are you aware of a physical feeling?

[RainbowUnicorn]

I like your evolutionary approach, which is totally missing in another forum where I brought up this question of our bodies and minds and feelings.  It spun out of a discussion of God.  Someone believes in a loving God, so I questioned is this possible if God does not have a body?  What you said about how we evolved with feelings necessary to our survival makes sense to me.  The rat brain in the video link is responding like the robotic vacuums that can sense obstacles and pull away from them, and we would not say that electrical robots have feelings.  Hum, now I am questioning myself.  When is a sensor a feeling?  

When I googled for information about the brain/body connection and feelings, I got information about emotions.  But if a neighbor tells me her cat died, I don't feel a thing.  I don't care.  On the other hand, when I think of my dog that died a few months ago, I may feel nothing, or I can start crying and I know that emotional response is a body thing.  The body thing can be triggered by a thought, but I swear it is not a feeling until I feel it.  It also isn't a feeling equal to jerking my hand back from a hot frying pan handle.  Avoiding a burnt hand doesn't involve a lot of thought or emotion, but hopefully, the experience becomes a memory that will help me avoid pain in the future.  Oh no, now I have this whole question tangled up with memory.  Exasperation- I feel like Brier Rabbit getting all tangled up with the tar baby.  We can have painful memories, but when that is so, isn't the pain physical, requiring a body?

ok... so taking a moment to put this into perspective.
what you are discribing may be something different from what you are asking.

Firstly what you are discribing is a disconnection between direct physical action stimuli & emotional state.
the brain is quite a tricky complex thing.
there are various issues and atributes which tend to help and also hinder at the same time.

for instance the ability to not feel emotionally is a distinct advantage in some aspects, while in others like riasing children to survive it is not very succesfull.

what i would suggest is that you may need to break down your question into a few different questions.
.. for instance, is it normal to not feel any emotion regarding another persons emotional issues ?
yes & no.
it can be helpful & yet quite a hinderance at the same time.
pro-evolutionary & yet con-evolutionary.

what you are still experiencing is loss and various other emotions related to your own loss.
attempting to negotiate a medium where you evaluate how you cope feeling about another persons similar loss at the same time is quite a hard ask to be completely fluid.
There are distinct intellectual advantages to emotional connections, along with distinct dissadvantages.

moving that to one side, is the brain existant to its self in a wholey seperate manner to emotional activity ?
lets move that forward one step...

"is thought an emotion" ?
muse that for a bit.

[confused2]

When you watch the sun rise are you aware of a physical feeling?

Yes. Many years ago I was on a sandy beach on an absolutely beautiful planet watching the local star rise up over the horizon as the planet turned. The heat, light and other radiation from a star has to be experienced to be believed. That was my 'perfect sunrise' - I haven't bothered much with it much since. Some years later I walked past a bunch of children in a sunrise situation - I rather doubt their parents had any idea where they were.

[RainbowUnicorn]

When you watch the sun rise are you aware of a physical feeling?

Yes. Many years ago I was on a sandy beach on an absolutely beautiful planet watching the local star rise up over the horizon as the planet turned. The heat, light and other radiation from a star has to be experienced to be believed. That was my 'perfect sunrise' - I haven't bothered much with it much since. Some years later I walked past a bunch of children in a sunrise situation - I rather doubt their parents had any idea where they were.

pondering your prose of form(i quite like it) reminds me of my beguile for generic collective bucket list compulsory norms.

Conversly thus;
How many people have had their pefect 1 nite stand ?
Perfect heart breaking moment...
Perfect feeling of loss...
Perfect feeling of loneliness...

I wonder what people truly believe they benefit by assimilating their emotional expereinces to be collective box ticking so as to be "the same" and yet declare they are an individual.

quite a fascinating focal point if one is to derive emotion as a purely internal individual reality, opposed to a physical expereince/group effect/encounter.

[Secular Sanity]

I don't think Ratty was sufficiently motivated to swap a diet of fruit cake and chocolate for a diet of nuts and berries. There were many other factors (and many other rats).

Yep, the fruitcake on its own has too many variables.  Some sweet, some nutty, some soaked in alcohol.   Kind of sounds like the ole place, eh?  It’s like A. Lee Martinez’s metaphor of fruitcake being like reality.  Once Ratty sunk his teeth into it, he probably realized that there were all sorts of nasty things lurking beneath the surface.  However, if Ratty was a female, it was undoubtedly the chocolate.  

The OP is about feelings - emotions - a sort of internal weather. My claim (which I stand by) is that I have less internal weather than when younger and I pay less attention to the internal weather that remains.

Older people are generally happier.  Most likely due to the changes in hormone production.
I’ll skip the Low-T jokes.  

---

I have found since I have started discussing feelings, I am more aware of my feelings.  A few times I have found it interesting that I was experiencing uncomfortable feelings that I didn't want, and found that curious.  Sometimes disagreements make me enjoy a discussion even more, and sometimes a disagreement leaves me feeling very irritated.  If several people are saying I am wrong, and no one agrees with my side of an argument, I feel awful. However, if just one other person is arguing my side of the argument, I find myself enjoying the argument again.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by  Lisa Feldman Barrett

If you start with the structure of the brain, and then ask yourself, what kind of mind can a brain like this create?  It turns out that we have the kind of brain that wires itself to its social and physical circumstances.  Infant brains are not born looking like grownup brains.  They are born awaiting a set of instructions to wire themselves to the environment and of a consequence, we have the kind of brain that can create many different kinds of minds.  So, the ideas, beliefs, emotions, and perceptions that your brain can make is largely based on the kind of experiences that you have previously had in your life. The words that we speak to our children, wire those children’s brains in a particular kind of way.

The brain also receives sensory inputs from the body, and it’s also making guesses about what’s going on in the body.  When that information comes from the body, the sensations that result from heartbeats, lungs expanding, inflammatory processes, and metabolic processes, that input either verifies the prediction or counters it.  This is really the secret to how emotions are made.

From your brains perspective, your body is a source of sensory input that it must make meaningful.  Sensations from your heart, your lungs, your metabolism, your changing temperature, and so on, are inherently ambiguous.  These purely physical sensations inside your body have no objective psychological meaning.  If you feel an ache inside your stomach while at the dinner table, you might experience it as hunger.  If in flu season you feel this ache, you might experience this ache as nausea.  If you’re a judge in a courtroom, you might experience this ache as a gut feeling that the defendant can’t be trusted.  In a given moment, in a given context, your brain uses your past experience to give meaning to your internal sensations, as well as your external sensations from the world simultaneously.  If you’re smelling a dirty diaper, you might experience that ache as disgust, or if your lover has just walked into the room, you might experience this ache as a pang of longing.  If you’re in a doctor’s office waiting for the results of a medical test, you might experience the same ache as an anxious feeling.  In each case your brain is using past experience to anticipate and give meaning to your aching stomach.

Emotions are meaning, they explain your body’s sensations in terms of what’s going on around you in the world.  They’re prescriptions for action.  So, your emotions are not reactions to the world, even though it may feel that way to you.  They are in fact, your constructions of what your body sensations mean in the world.

How Emotions Are Made

In other words, as she sees it, emotions are totally made up. She compares the concept of emotion to the concept of money.  For the large part, we fill in the blanks, and this is how your brain makes sense of the sensory input from your environment.  You’re telling yourself a story about what is happening around and to you.  You’re the narrator.

Moral of the story...

I really that I fit the personality type of the debater.   For sure I love exploring what we think and I like to stir things up by saying things that are off the wall.

Choose your words wisely.

[confused2]

From what SS posted...
[How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by  Lisa Feldman Barrett]
"The brain also receives sensory inputs from the body, and it’s also making guesses about what’s going in the body.  When that information comes from the body, the sensations that results from heartbeats, lungs expanding, inflammatory processes, and metabolic processes, that input either verifies the prediction or counters it.  This is really the secret to how emotions are made."

Compare with RainbowUnicorn:-
Conversly thus;
How many people have had their pefect 1 nite stand ?
Perfect heart breaking moment...
Perfect feeling of loss...
Perfect feeling of loneliness...

He/she speaks of emotions in supervisor mode (thank you) ... we can have emotions without being defined by them. Emotions are are just a part of 'being human'. I'm kinda painted into a corner here. Another part of 'being human' would be what? Raw intellect driven by ... driven by what?

[RainbowUnicorn]

From what SS posted...
[How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by  Lisa Feldman Barrett]
"The brain also receives sensory inputs from the body, and it’s also making guesses about what’s going in the body.  When that information comes from the body, the sensations that results from heartbeats, lungs expanding, inflammatory processes, and metabolic processes, that input either verifies the prediction or counters it.  This is really the secret to how emotions are made."

Compare with RainbowUnicorn:-
Conversly thus;
How many people have had their pefect 1 nite stand ?
Perfect heart breaking moment...
Perfect feeling of loss...
Perfect feeling of loneliness...

He/she speaks of emotions in supervisor mode (thank you) ... we can have emotions without being defined by them. Emotions are are just a part of 'being human'. I'm kinda painted into a corner here. Another part of 'being human' would be what? Raw intellect driven by ... driven by what?

Raw intellect driven by ... driven by what?

for scientific prose if Raw intellect was driven it woould be driven by basic limbic atributes which could arguebly be defined by ID Ego Sexual reproductive drive, accumulation of things ...
and interestingly enough these ideas might seem familar to those who have experienced a relationship with a highly materialistic person.
all be it emotional drive being forced in a metaphysical format to avoid emotions and thus being the victim of whims and reactionary irrational conflict.

you see this type of behaviour in the classic vacuos materialist of teenagers bent on image obsession or material wealth as status symbols driving the Ego as the primary atribute.

thus i would suggest it is impossible to not be driven by emotions.

though i would not neglect to say there is also intellectual drive, however this too could be driven by a sense of an emotion to "know".

[confused2]

for scientific prose if Raw intellect was driven it woould be driven by basic limbic atributes which could arguebly be defined by ID Ego Sexual reproductive drive, accumulation of things ...
and interestingly enough these ideas might seem familar to those who have experienced a relationship with a highly materialistic person.

... and so I find endorphins - natures reward for a job well done. Looking at my local birds - they spent a lot of time and effort building a nest. I was surprised to find long thorns on the roof which I don't think are local. They used the thorns to nail the structure together and the result is a good nest. The result of a good nest is not just a good nest but also endorphins(?). Are they urged in the direction of building a good nest by endorphins? The better the nest the bigger the hit of endorphins - every year they try to build a better nest. Getting the long thorns and working out how to use them could be a rush on the way to the final product. They only need a vague idea of a nest as somewhere to lay eggs in and they get to use their considerable intelligence to work out how to do it in the best possible way. Bonus points for innovation.

Could that be IT? It kinda looks like it could work for birds, rats, hamsters and me.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/endorphins1.htm

Intriguingly, endorphins (or a lack thereof) may be responsible for certain forms of mental illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. When you, the average person, are washing your hands, there's a point when you register that the task has been satisfactorily completed. If endorphins are at least partly responsible for saying "when," a person who doesn't have enough may never receive the mental cue to stop washing his or her hands and will continue until that signal is received.

Old folks (if we are lucky) have built a good 'nest' and we get a constant supply of endorphins topped up by alcohol as and when required. Nothing to do with Low-T thank you very much.

Thoughts anyone?

[RainbowUnicorn]

for scientific prose if Raw intellect was driven it woould be driven by basic limbic atributes which could arguebly be defined by ID Ego Sexual reproductive drive, accumulation of things ...
and interestingly enough these ideas might seem familar to those who have experienced a relationship with a highly materialistic person.

... and so I find endorphins - natures reward for a job well done. Looking at my local birds - they spent a lot of time and effort building a nest. I was surprised to find long thorns on the roof which I don't think are local. They used the thorns to nail the structure together and the result is a good nest. The result of a good nest is not just a good nest but also endorphins(?). Are they urged in the direction of building a good nest by endorphins? The better the nest the bigger the hit of endorphins - every year they try to build a better nest. Getting the long thorns and working out how to use them could be a rush on the way to the final product. They only need a vague idea of a nest as somewhere to lay eggs in and they get to use their considerable intelligence to work out how to do it in the best possible way. Bonus points for innovation.

Could that be IT? It kinda looks like it could work for birds, rats, hamsters and me.

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/endorphins1.htm

Intriguingly, endorphins (or a lack thereof) may be responsible for certain forms of mental illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. When you, the average person, are washing your hands, there's a point when you register that the task has been satisfactorily completed. If endorphins are at least partly responsible for saying "when," a person who doesn't have enough may never receive the mental cue to stop washing his or her hands and will continue until that signal is received.

Old folks (if we are lucky) have built a good 'nest' and we get a constant supply of endorphins topped up by alcohol as and when required. Nothing to do with Low-T thank you very much.

Thoughts anyone?

i like your methadology.
weirdly enough i find myself asking the question of realativistic time concepts on the state of intellectual awareness.

Birds move at a much faster pace and live considerably shorter lives(except Cockatoos which do not make nests & live to around 50 or 60 years old)

does time pass more slowly for them ?

Endorphines...
one of the most powerful drugs known to the species.
how do we make endorphines when we want to ?

does happiness require constant endorphine production ?
people who do not have the ability to make endorphines are never happy ?
is it possible to be happy without endorphines ?
is happy just a state of drug influence on the mind like marijuana herion cocaine mdma ?

species selection via darwinian evolution relys on survival not happiness.
nest building might be a mental illness in birds.

the birds may actually hate building the nests and might be in a state of constant pain & suffering while nest building.

[Secular Sanity]

Old folks (if we are lucky) have built a good 'nest' and we get a constant supply of endorphins topped up by alcohol as and when required. Nothing to do with Low-T thank you very much.

Thoughts anyone?

Well, we do know that testosterone is significantly correlated with aggression and competitive behavior, thank you very much.  I wouldn't say, though, that Low-T makes you less emotional.  Older men tend to get a little more sappy and tearful.  Maybe that Low-T allows you to experience that tiny bit of estrogen produced by your fat cells.  

However, Dr. Robert Rose said that in humans hormones only set the stage, while social factors determine if and how they are expressed.

Older people have less time, C2.  So, you’re less likely to sweat the small stuff and you're probably more appreciative.

I was thinking about something, though, C2.  Since we’re living in a time where people are living longer, I wonder if that in and of itself will have any impact on declining hormone levels.  

No offense, C2, but I think men are a little odd at times.  Due to their competitive nature, they seem to exaggerate their talents, and minimize their shortcomings more than women do.

I have this neighbor, who happens to be from England, but I doubt that it’s just Englishmen.  He bought a small vineyard near me and was in the process of building a house.  He was curious about mine, and my handywoman talents, which were solely inspired by my frugalness.  He mentioned that his daughter was good at math, but that she loved physics.  He said that he really enjoyed physics, too, but mainly the math involved in physics.  He had a wine tasting event that I attended.  I was chatting with an older couple.  The woman was a botanist and her husband was a retired engineer.  We started discussing the beauty found in mathematical equations.  His wife wanted to leave, but he said that it was just starting to get interesting.  I was trying to be polite and draw my neighbor into the conversation.  I said, "Oh, ya, you enjoy math, too."  His wife gave me a strange look.  At first, I thought it was a little mate guarding thingy, but then he looked really uncomfortable and perplexed.  He said, no, my daughter is really good at math and directed the conversation towards her.  I think that he lied.  He probably didn’t he even build his little nest.

It sort of reminded me of C C’s topic about men interrupting even the most powerful women. Not only are men more prone to interrupting, they also brag way more than women.

I’ve been wanting to put in a very small vineyard for the aesthetic appeal.  Another gentleman that I know is a physician.  He owns a small vineyard, as well.  I was asking him about the cost and the education.  He had taken a few classes in enology.  I asked him if he had any other interests outside of his work and winemaking.  He said, well, I have a boat and a plane.  They are hobbies, but I thought it was rather braggadocious.  He’s 73.  He’s sort of a cantankerous old fart.  Come to find out, he also has a 13 year old boy from his second wife, who is 37.  No wonder he’s cranky.

Well, quite a few older folks are losing their nest during divorce and more and more men are having children in their golden years.  Mostly due to the fact that men are remarrying younger women.  They also remarry faster and more often than women do.  I’ve known of a man or two, who have even had vasectomy reversals when their new little hottie wants a baby.

I wonder if this increase in longevity will alter a man’s diminishing hormone levels in some way.