Is good an actual quality like water that we need to drink?

[The Transcended Omniverse]

Psychologists often divide emotions into two categories: intrinsically positive and intrinsically negative (i.e. feeling good and feeling bad). I have every reason to think this division is true based upon my own personal experience. After all, positive and negative, good and bad, light and darkness is a well known concept in many movies, anime, artwork, etc. Feeling good and feeling bad is an actual quality of good and bad.

This means that good and bad are actual qualities like water, food, electricity, etc. That is, they are actual things rather than ideas or concepts. If you are someone who struggled with depression or negative emotions such as feelings of anger, disgust, or sadness where you had little to no positive emotions in your life, then you would be having little to no good value in your life just as how you would be having little to no water.

The thought and belief of having water in your life will not give you actual water just as how believing that your life is still good, joyful, beautiful, and worth living during your miserable moments or other negative emotional states would not bring your life any of those things either. Sadly, this means that all those famous and genius miserable artists and composers had little to no good value in their lives regardless of what they believed otherwise. Their lives and artistic endeavors were virtually meaningless and empty even though they were deluded otherwise.

So, with all of this being said, positive and negative emotions, also known as pleasant and unpleasant emotions, are intrinsically good and bad. Beliefs and mindsets themselves are not the same thing as emotions because, if you were in the most miserable state of your life and you believed that you were in a positive emotional state such as feeling joyful and excited about a certain idea such as going to the carnival, then you wouldn't be.

It would just be the thought of being excited and joyful, but no real excitement and joy. Our positive and negative emotions would be like our own inner light and inner darkness. It is the inner light we need to truly make our lives and artistic endeavors good and beautiful and it is the darkness we should avoid since that can only make our lives bad and shit. This means that the only way to live and be an artist is through positive emotions.

To conclude this packet, I will point out something interesting here. Emotions themselves are actual value judgments. Here is a response from a skeptic/neuroscientist which supports this:

Emotions are value judgments too. If they weren't, humanity would not be distinct from other mammals; we would be biological machines with no autonomy, acting purely on instinct. For example, if you are physically hurt, and the doctor treating you causes you pain during treatment, do you become angry and bite him? No, because you are able to override your instinctive anger and fear at someone causing you pain with your ability to reason that the treatment is necessary and the pain is temporary. But a dog can't reason, and will bite to stop the person causing the pain. Both the instinctive emotions AND the reasoned thoughts are value judgments.

Therefore, since our positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and our negative emotions always being emotional value judgments of bad value, since emotions themselves are actual qualities (things that exist such as water, food, electricity, etc.), then positive emotions would have to be a quality of good and negative emotions would have to be a quality of bad.

This means that the only way to live the most beautiful, good, and worthwhile life would be if you were in the most profound, intense state of euphoria of your life and the only worst life you can live would be if you were in the most profoundly horrible negative emotional state of your life. Unfortunately, moments of euphoria are very brief and fleeting which means that your life can only be the greatest for you in brief, fleeting moments.

Other Person's Response: Could you give me an example of people who think that their positive emotions are the inner light to their lives as you claim?

My Reply: There are many people out there who struggle with depression. Many hate their lives and they just want to die. They say that having a positive mindset does nothing for them. This supports my worldview quite well because these depressed people are only expressing the truth here. They are merely expressing the need for the inner light back into their lives again. Many people out there don't realize this truth. Depressed people simply come to the aid of therapists, counselors, and mental health professionals who help change their thinking and work on certain therapeutic methods when, in reality, none of these things were the issue.

What really needs to be done for these depressed folks is to somehow find a way to restore their positive emotions. I realize that antidepressants are one method. But something more needs to be done here since our positive emotions are truly the only things we have to make our lives good and worth living for. I don't care if anything I say offends or upsets you. The truth is the truth and it needs to be shared. I, myself, have struggled 10 whole years with the worst misery of my life induced by emotional traumas and obsessive thinking and it is time I shared the truth of my personal experience to the world.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 27 by Divine Insight]

I still disagree no matter what. At this point, you can continue to address the objections I will continue to give. Or you can just give up the discussion.

I have already shown why your arguments are illogical and non sequitur.

At this point all I could suggest is that you actually "test" your hypothesis in the real world. Take a moral issue, decide what your emotional feelings are about it. And then argue with people why they should accept your emotional feelings over theirs.

I think you'll quickly discover that your hypothesis has extreme problems.

I am beating up the ground there. But it's only because I have a metal detector and it is beeping loudly. The banging would be me using a shovel in digging for an ancient treasure that humanity has overlooked. They think it's not there, but I think it's there. That uncovered treasure would be the truth of the hedonistic philosophy.

Even if you were to argue for the "Truth of the hedonistic philosophy" you could still only argue for it on a subjective basis.

Not everyone finds pleasure in the same things. Therefore any hedonistic philosophy must necessarily be based on subjective desires.

In fact, Christians often have this problem concerning their concept of what heaven might be like. What some people think would be a paradise other people would consider to be a hell, and vice versa.

~~~~~~

Just as an interesting aside, you should easily be able to argue for the truth of a Hedonistic Philosophy regarding the Christian's concept of a heavenly paradise. After all, how could it be considered to be a paradise if the people living there don't consider the place to be pleasurable?

~~~~~~

One thing you can argue for is the truth of your own personal right to live your life based on a hedonistic philosophy. You could even argue that all humans are ultimately making decisions based on their own subjective desires. In fact, I'm pretty sure that argument has been made quite often and would be quite difficult to refute.

But none of the above suggests any absolute values of good or bad.

That's the part of your argument where I see your greatest errors.

If you want to change your position from your claim that absolute good and bad values can be revealed by emotions, to simply saying that emotions are required to make subjective evaluations of good and bad, then I wouldn't argue with that at all.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 31 by Divine Insight]

Just to be clear, when you say that we have our own subjective values, you are referring to the rational value judgments in addition to the emotional ones, right? Are you disagreeing with my notion that rational value judgments are not any real value judgments in our lives? Personally, I think that the only subjective values we can have in our lives would be the emotional ones and not the rational/thought ones. I guess you could consider me someone like a sociopath who does not understand empathy since he never had any. Of course, I am not a sociopath and this is just an analogy for saying that I simply do not understand how one can live a life that is truly good, beautiful, and worth living for independent of positive emotions. As a matter of fact, I never recall a single given moment in my life where I perceived real value independent of my emotions. If there was a given moment, then I do not recall.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 31 by Divine Insight]

Just to be clear, when you say that we have our own subjective values, you are referring to the rational value judgments in addition to the emotional ones, right? Are you disagreeing with my notion that rational value judgments are not any real value judgments in our lives? Personally, I think that the only subjective values we can have in our lives would be the emotional ones and not the rational/thought ones.

Yes, I disagree with your notion that rational value judgments are not any real value judgments in our lives. In fact, I have already demonstrated the fallacy of that notion.

Keep in mind that you are the one who has accepted that without emotions life could have no value. I have never agreed to that premise. It would certainly be true that without emotions we could not give life an "emotional value", but that may not be the only type of value that we can potentially give to life.

By the way, if you postulate as a premise that only emotional feelings can give life value, then of course a hedonistic philosophy would necessarily follow from that because you have already postulated that our emotional desires are all that can give life value.

However, even when you make that argument it would still be an argument for relative subjective value since everyone has different emotions and thus would evaluate life differently.

So even if I allow that emotions are the only thing that give life value that still wouldn't help your case that emotions help people see any absolute good or bad.

So this wouldn't help your argument in any case.

~~~~~

There is also the observation that our rational thinking influences our emotions. We find sound arguments to be more emotionally appealing (aesthetic) than logically flawed arguments. Therefore rational thinking has an inseparable connection with emotions. At least in those who assign emotional value to clear and rational thinking.

Keep in mind that even based on your theory, if a person finds rational thinking to be an emotionally positive experience then rational thinking has been "revealed" to them via the "glasses" of their emotions to be absolute "Gold" (i.e. having good value).

So ironically even your emotional worldview wouldn't escape the reality of rational value.

And then we also have the observation that not everyone places emotional value on rational thinking. So once again, we see that it becomes a subjective emotional ideal.

Spoiler Alert: It's always going to end up being a subjective emotional ideal.

[bluethread]

To say that the thought itself is a rational form of a heard noise, a smell, and perceived colors would be nonsense and it would just create one big mess here. That is why we would say that the thoughts alone can only be the idea of sounds, smell, visuals, values, emotions, etc., but that they do not give our lives any real version of those things.

I will take your advise and respond to this portion of the last thing you posted before my last post. The problem is that the perception is the heard noise, or better stated, how the noise is heard. For the sake of sanity we generally act as if our perception of things is shared by others and this is generally not a problem, because the differences in how I perceive sounds does not significantly vary from the way others perceive them. We agree that the sound you hear and the sound I hear are from the same source. Now, I am not talking about the wave length, frequency or timbre, but what I actually perceive as the sound of that wave length at that frequency with that timbre. That is a personal experience that can not be empirically shared. There might be some empathic ability that could make that possible, but that would be beyond current empirical recognition. There is no perfect chord without a listener, and that perfection must be shared by the listener.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 33 by Divine Insight]

Alright, I understand. But my worldview is still the same for me, personally. I personally do not think that the rational values can be any emotional state anyway and that it can only be the biochemical induced emotions which are the real emotions. I will just say this which I think you have skipped. I tack on some additional things to this as well:

"I guess you could consider me someone like a sociopath who does not understand empathy since he never had any. Of course, I am not a sociopath and this is just an analogy for saying that I simply do not understand how one can live a life that is truly good, beautiful, and worth living for independent of positive emotions. As a matter of fact, I never recall a single given moment in my life where I perceived real value independent of my emotions. If there was a given moment, then I do not recall. Neither have my rational based values been any real emotional state in my life either. You could fully educate a sociopath on empathy, but the sociopath would still not understand it since he never had it.

Likewise, you could also fully educate me on values, morals, and ethics and how our rational value judgments can be emotional states, but I would never understand that either since this is something that has never been known to me from personal experience. The only way my worldview could change to a new sense of values would, therefore, be if I had a whole new personal experience that could replace all the good values, joy, beauty, misery, badness, etc. that my positive and negative emotions have offered me. Remember, this has to be a real version of those things in my life and not just a matter of empty words. I would pay very close attention to my inner universe. If there is a real form of those things there, then my life would have a real version of those things. If not, then they would not be anything real, they would just be empty words, and there would also still be no real emotion there either.

As a matter of fact, I think skeptics and neuroscientists have even said that we can't have empathy without emotions, but that we can have emotions without empathy. I think I have heard them also say that our rational value judgments themselves are not any real emotional state and that the only real emotions are the biochemical emotions defined in my lexicon. Since you cannot have empathy without emotions, then I don't think you can have any real value and worth in your life either without emotions. Since emotions are the biochemical induced states, then it would have to follow that, not only can you have no empathy without these biochemical emotions, but you also cannot have any real value in your life either. This would have to, therefore, mean that rational value judgments themselves are not any real value judgments and neither are they real emotions.

In short, since positive biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and since negative biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then having no biochemical emotions (i.e. the rational value judgments themselves) would have to be no real value judgments since there is good, bad, and neutral (neither good nor bad, aka no value). Sure, you could have a positive or negative biochemical emotion present, but any rational value judgments mixed in with those emotions cannot be any real value judgments."

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 34 by bluethread]

By this, are you implying that emotions feel different for different people just as how a heard noise would be heard differently? The thoughts themselves would still not be any state of hearing sound and neither would they be any emotional state. But the heard noise would still be different for different people just as how emotions would feel different for different people.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 35 by The Transcended Omniverse]

The only thing I would point out is that nothing you have said in post #35 implies, or even requires, that your personal emotional enjoyment of life needs to be anything more than your own personal subjective perception of what you deem to be emotionally positive.

I live an emotionally positive life too. But this doesn't lead me to the conclusion that things I find to be emotionally positive are anything other than my own personal preferences. Some other people also find similar things to be emotionally positive, others do not.

In fact, one of the most profound examples is the difference between myself and my sister. I prefer a quiet rural life surrounded by a natural forest. My sister, on the other hand, would become extremely emotionally distraught living my lifestyle. She isn't emotionally happy unless she's living in a city surrounded by the hustle and bustle of lots of people. Something that is not emotionally uplifting to me.

So there you have it. Pretty much proof positive that positive emotions are subjective.

It only requires one counter-example to prove a hypothesis to be false, and I just gave that counter-example.

So it can't be that our emotional feelings reflect any "absolute good". Everyone has their own subjective ideals of what they consider to be "good or bad".

So your hypothesis may work for you subjectively, it may even work for me subjectively, but the suggestion that our positive emotions are revealing some absolute good that could work for everyone, can't be true.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 33 by Divine Insight]

When I mention an absolute good and bad, then all I am saying here is that it can only be our emotional value judgments which are the real value judgments, just so you know. It's as simple as that.

In short, since positive biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and since negative biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then having no biochemical emotions (i.e. the rational value judgments themselves) would have to be no real value judgments since there is good, bad, and neutral (neither good nor bad, aka no value). Sure, you could have a positive or negative biochemical emotion present, but any rational value judgments mixed in with those emotions cannot be any real value judgments. You have positive, negative, and neutral just like you have a positive charge, a negative charge, and a neutral (no) charge.

Positive emotions (a good value judgment) would be analogous with a positive charge, negative emotions (a bad value judgment) would be analogous with a negative charge, and rational value judgments themselves would be analogous with no charge. Therefore, that is why we can't have any real rational value judgments since they are analogous with no charge. Rational value judgments themselves cannot be any real emotions either because, again, positive emotions would be analogous with the positive charge, negative emotions would be analogous with the negative charge, and rational value judgments themselves would be analogous with no charge which is why they can't be any real emotions.

[bluethread]

[Replying to post 34 by bluethread]

By this, are you implying that emotions feel different for different people just as how a heard noise would be heard differently? The thoughts themselves would still not be any state of hearing sound and neither would they be any emotional state. But the heard noise would still be different for different people just as how emotions would feel different for different people.

Yes, I would agree with that. I would say that emotions are even more so, since they constitute not just the recognition of a stimuli, but an experience related to the interaction of various systems of an organism with a particular consciousness that resides within that organism. The complicated nature of the interactions between those systems and between them and the collective consciousness can not, IMO be accurately communicated from one organism to another. I submit that is one reason why emotionally based relationships are the most unstable and also the strongest, in those rare cases where stability is achieved. I am of the opinion that the "soul mate" phenomenon is less about actual empathy and more about symbiosis, where one's perception of another's emotions evokes responses that the other happens to value, regardless of whether the person really empathizes or not. So, romantic love is more about responding to one's own emotions than understanding the emotions of the other.

[Complexity]

Goodness =
1. What is valuable to an observer/s (relative value; an opinion which can change radically & quickly)
2. Drummed up value, to make life happy (a sweet illusion; yet flimsy)
3. What has absolute value, coming from an absolute source

By nature, we value ourselves as something good; and our friends who add to our lives = valuable (a good), and things we are fond of (I loved my first car way too much). But those have flimsy foundations, and can be lost in a wink. Some people are suicidal and depressed, not because of a chemical imbalance or a life tragedy, but because of fully embracing a Darwinian deterministic animalistic philosophy. I experienced that 1969-1970. I obviously hung on to a sliver of hope of finding a goodness that is beyond the theory of man being a doomed hairless ape, fooling himself about his importance.

Most Atheist hang on to a theory of the goodness of life by various theories and methods. Some create a godless theory of transcendent, absolute value and goodness. The only potential foundation I see for goodness, beyond the flimsy physical, is the hope for a good God with an absolute foundation. I believe the rational case for God is solid & superior; but not 100% available to man; thus a faith step is required.