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]

My basis is my own personal and profound experience. I am absolutely convinced of this since it is as clear as day to me and I have profound insight into my own personal experience. Rational/thought judgments of good value make us feel positive emotions such as it being a good and lovely day today and it is through our positive emotions that we are able to perceive that good value we judged to be there in the first place.

You conclusions from your personal experiences are demonstrably wrong.

Our emotions are malleable. How we emotionally feel about various things changes over time. It especially changes as we gain new knowledge and understanding.

Therefore our positive emotions on anything cannot be said to have revealed to us any absolute good value. All our emotions amount to is how we have personally and subjectively decided to react to various situations.

So your conclusions are non-sequitur. You have made a grave logical error in your reasoning here. So if that's your position then you are demonstrably wrong in your conclusion. All that's required at this point is for you to see the truth of this.

Therefore, that is the reason why our positive and negative emotions are like glasses we need to wear in order to see the values in our lives. It would also be no different than if you were in a pitch black cave and you believed gold was in that cave. That belief/mindset alone would not allow you to see the gold. You would need actual light to see the gold. The more light you have, the more the gold shines which means you are able to see the gold more. The less light you have, the less the gold shines which means the less of the gold you will see. In that same sense, our positive emotions are like the light that allow us to see the good values in our lives and our negative emotions allow us to see the bad values in our lives.

This analogy is clearly false. It's a demonstrably false analogy. Our emotions are not like light that allows us to see "good value" in things. To the contrary are emotions are demonstrably nothing more than our own personal subjective feelings about how we react to various things. This truth cannot be denied by anyone who has ever changed the way they view various things and thus has changed how they emotionally react to them of feel about them.

I have personal experience with the latter. I know for a fact that I have changed the way I emotionally feel about various things throughout my life as I have gained more knowledge. Therefore knowledge and logical reasoning has been what I have used to determine how I personally choose to judge the qualify of "value".

~~~~~~

Case in point:

When I was younger I had strong negative emotions associated with same gender male intimate relationships. For some reason same gender female intimate relationships never bothered me emotionally. I had no negative emotions associated with seeing two girls or women being sexually intimate toward each other. But I did have negative emotions seeing two boys or men being sexually intimate toward each other.

Later I realized that much of my negative emotion on this issue had to do with the fact that I personally found the idea of becoming sexually intimate with another man to be repugnant. I also came to the realization that it's none of my business what other men do. And through this intellectual insight I "saw the light" that my emotional reaction to a given situation is entirely up to me. It's under my control and it's malleable. I no longer have negative emotions associated with seeing (or knowing) that other men are intimately attracted to one another.

I recognized that my personal emotions are not the criteria for what is right or wrong, or good or bad.

I still have negative emotions associated with the idea of becoming sexually intimate with another male. However, that's a personal preference. It's not some sort of absolute "gold" that I can "see" because I'm wearing emotional glasses.

Moreover, I know know that I was wrong to judge the behavior of others based on what I personally have negative emotional reactions to.

So, your claim that our emotions are the "light" that allows us to see the "gold" (what you claim to be absolute values of good or bad), is simply wrong. It's demonstrably wrong.

You have made a terrible error in your logical reasoning. Period.

It doesn't matter what "Personal Experiences" you might have had. Your logical reasoning is still flawed.

There is no personal experience that you could have possibly had that could confirm that your personal emotional feelings determine what is absolutely good or bad in any universal sense.

If you have convinced yourself of this then you have simply convinced yourself of a demonstrable falsehood.

Our emotions are malleable. They change with maturity and knowledge. Therefore our emotions cannot possibly be a dependable indicator of any absolute good or bad values in the world.

Therefore your conclusion to the contrary is clearly false. You've made an error in logical reasoning. Your personal experiences in the matter are irrelevant because no matter what personal experiences you might have had they can't change the fact that your logical argument is demonstrably false.

Your emotional reaction to situation and events in this world are nothing more than your own personal subjective reactions. They are not a light that illuminates some absolute gold.

I'm afraid that this is a demonstrable truth. And you should be able to "see" the truth in this if you take the time to reason through it. Not everyone has the same emotional feelings about things. That alone proves the fallacy of your argument that your emotional feelings allow you to see some absolute values of good or bad in reality.

Not everyone has your emotional response to things. Therefore your personal subjective emotions would need to rule supreme in determining what is "good" or "bad" if your emotions are the "light" that allows you to see absolute "gold". Clearly that's not going to fly. Not all humans will agree with your subjective emotional feelings.

The fact that your analysis is wrong should be as clear as the sun in the sky on a cloudless day. If you can't see the error in your logic at this point then I can't imagine what more I could say to help you to see it.

Your personal emotions do not determine absolute values of good or bad. Your emotions are nothing more than how you personally react to the world around you. Period. And your emotions are malleable. They change with maturity, and with new information, knowledge, and understanding. So emotions can't be an indicator of anything absolute.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 21 by Divine Insight]

I already realize that our emotions can change over time and that such realizations can allow us to change our actions and whatnot, but this still does not mean that such realizations allow us to actually see good or bad value. When you felt a negative emotion from that idea you pointed out and acted out on that negative emotion as though this idea really was something horrible, but later came to the realization that it was never anything bad, then that is nothing more than just a realization. You are still not seeing the good value as long as you did not feel any positive emotion. This is because no realization a blind person makes can allow him to see colors and no realization a person in a pitch black cave makes can allow him to see the gold. The blind person still needs sight to see and the person in the pitch black cave still needs the light to see the gold. Lastly, any further objections you have I will be glad to address.

Allow me to make myself more clear here. There are certain things, moments, and situations which hold their own good and bad values, but the only way we can see those values would be through our emotions and not through our realizations or mindsets themselves. You could either perceive the value that these situations have or you can perceive your own personal value in regards to these situations. For example, if a mother was feeding her child vegetables and the child hated them since he felt a negative emotion from them, even though the vegetables are good, the child would be perceiving his own personal bad value in regards to those vegetables. It would be sort of like a hallucination since a hallucination would be our own perceived sounds, images, etc. But if the child felt a positive emotion from those vegetables, then he would be seeing them as a good thing. But no realization alone that the vegetables are good can allow the child to see those vegetables as being good as long as he did not feel a positive emotion from them.

My worldview might seem demonstrably false, but aren't things that sound absurd often true? Just because my worldview sounds absurd does not mean that it is false since there are so many things that are absurd in this life that are true. It is just the absurdity of life rule. There are certain things in this world such as people dying from deadly viruses and, even though this is an absurd thing, it is real. So, life isn't perfect and it seems to me that you are expecting a certain value system to be the real value system which is why you see my value system as being false. But life doesn't always meet our expectations and we don't always get what we want in life. My value system might certainly be one that doesn't work well for humanity, but, then again, there are many absurd things in this life that just don't work out for us, but said things are true. Instead, humanity tends to delude themselves of such things because they simply do not like them and wish to have things their way.

[Divine Insight]

I already realize that our emotions can change over time and that such realizations can allow us to change our actions and whatnot, but this still does not mean that such realizations allow us to actually see good or bad value.

Exactly. And therefore your argument that emotions are glasses that allow us to see some imagined absolute good or bad is false.

You've just confirmed right there that your original argument fails.

And by the way, the emotions weren't the "realization". The emotions changed after other factors (i.e. information, understanding, and logical reasoning) have "revealed" the better course of action.

So the emotions are not the realization. The emotions simply change after realization has been gained from other means. This is contrary to your argument that emotions themselves are the "glasses" that bring about the realization.

So at this point you are barking up an empty tree as they say. There's nothing left to your argument. It's been thoroughly debunked.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 23 by Divine Insight]

I'm still not understanding here. I said that you could realize that something is good or bad through your mindsets alone, but that would not allow you to see it as being good or bad as long as the respective emotion was not there. That still all goes back to my child with the vegetables analogy.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 23 by Divine Insight]

I'm still not understanding here. I said that you could realize that something is good or bad through your mindsets alone, but that would not allow you to see it as being good or bad as long as the respective emotion was not there. That still all goes back to my child with the vegetables analogy.

So what?

What do you think this suggests or proves?

All you are saying here is that we can't make subjective judgments about what we deem to be good or bad unless we have a capacity to "feel" that something is good or bad.

In other words, all you are saying is that emotions are required to make subjective judgments about what we feel is "good" or "bad".

How does that imply that there exists any absolute "good or bad" that our emotions are enabling us to "see"?

It seems to me that you are doing a lot of jumping to conclusions for no rational reason.

In fact, with respect to some things I have come to realize that my emotions aren't even relevant at all. For example, it's totally irrelevant how I might emotionally feel about the behavior of other people, as long as their behavior isn't directly influencing me in some negative way.

Therefore on many issues of what constitutes "good or bad" I don't even have an emotional opinion about them at all. They simply don't give rise to any emotions within me because I recognize intellectually that how I might emotionally feel about it is totally irrelevant.

This is extremely contrary to your claim that our emotions are our window into absolute good and bad that supposedly exist beyond our own personal judgements.

In short, just because you can't make emotional judgments if you don't have the ability to have emotions, doesn't mean that your emotions are a reflection of some absolute good or bad that exists outside of your emotions.

You are the one who ultimately decides how you will emotionally react to any given situation. This is what Anger Management Classes, are based on. The fact that we do have control over our emotions is paramount to the success of Anger Management Classes.

So your suggestion that emotions are something that reveal anything to us at all is simply absurd. That's clearly not the case. We are in control of our emotions, not the other way around. At least assuming we are a sane and healthy person. Some people are totally controlled by their emotions, but those people are typically a mess.

Having no control over your emotions is typically an undesirable state to be in.

And the fact that we can take control of our emotions and harness them using higher cognitive skills, proves beyond any shadow of a doubt, that your hypothesis that emotions enable us to see absolute good and bad values is clearly false.

Your hypothesis is to obviously flawed that if you can't see it by now I just really don't know what else can be said.

You said in an earlier post that you would like scientists to join you in your quest:

I am trying to discover this new good and bad that I think is real and other people and scientists can join me in this search for truth.

Well, I'm a scientist. I just joined you in your quest by listening to your hypothesis. I would have been more than happy to confirm anything you clearly have correct. And or explore with you any ideas that you might have that require further exploration.

However, as it turns out, your argument fails. And I have shown why your logic is demonstrably flawed. I have demonstrated why it fails using several explanations and examples.

Yet you continue to argue that it's a valid argument.

At this point, as I say, you are barking up an empty tree.

I have already shown why you hypothesis is not tenable.

Human emotions cannot be used to determine some imagined absolute values of good or bad. That's just a flawed hypothesis, and I have demonstrated repeatedly why it is flawed.

I'm not sure what more can be said at this point. You seem to either be unable to see why your hypothesis fails, or you're just unwilling to accept this conclusion even after I have shown why the hypothesis necessarily fails.

Whatever your motivation is I can't know. But your hypothesis has shown to be flawed. Your conclusions don't follow from your arguments.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 25 by Divine Insight]

First off, all I am saying here is that our emotions allow us to judge things and situations as being good or bad which I define as seeing the good and bad value. Most people would think that, having no emotions at all would render us into a position where no rational value judgment would work to bring our lives real value. They would say that we either need positive emotions or negative emotions in order to formulate a form of rational value judgment that would bring our lives real value (allow us to see value) since rational value judgments alone without any emotions will not work. It's that very reason why many artists believe that negative emotions can allow them to have good value in their lives through creating their works of art. Many skeptics and neuroscientists would tell you that we need emotions in our lives. Otherwise, without emotions, then our lives would truly be empty.

But I think they are wrong when they say that having emotions allows the rational value judgments to become real perceived value in our lives. Just as how having no emotions at all would render your life completely empty which means that we need them to give our lives real value, then having the emotions themselves also dictates the value of our lives and our rational value judgments alone, even while we have emotions, do not dictate the perceived value of our lives. Given this, emotions would have to be the only way we can judge things as being good or bad. Positive emotions are the only way we can judge things as being good and negative emotions are the only way we can judge things as being bad.

So, even if we were in nothing but a negative emotional state, then we could actually not judge anything in our lives as being good. If you were to judge something in your life as being good while in nothing but a negative emotional state and there was no positive emotion there, then we would not define that as being a value judgment of good value. It would just be the thought of good value, but no real judgment. Remember, I said earlier that emotions are the same thing as value judgments since they are emotional value judgments and that thoughts themselves of joy, suffering, water, happiness, sounds, visuals, etc. were just ideas of these things. Therefore, this means that our rational value judgments are not actual value judgments, but are instead ideas of value judgments while it can only be our emotions which are the real value judgments.

Since we and our lives are nothing without our emotions, then this means we are insignificant compared to our emotions and we are not the ones in charge here. It is instead our emotions which are in charge of the value of our lives. It would be no different than a puppet and a master. Without the master pulling the strings, then the puppet is lifeless. But when the master is animating the puppet, the puppet, even though it has come to life, does not call the shots.

It is still the master who is in charge. This puppet analogy expresses the value of our lives either being dead and lifeless (nonexistent) without our emotions (our master), or us having real value in our lives, but the value being dictated solely by our master, the emotions. I will apply this puppet analogy to my gold analogy by saying that the light from the light source whether it be the sun, a flashlight, or a torch would be our master since it allows us to see the gold in the pitch black cave. We can either dim the light or brighten it just as how we could choose to do certain things that trigger positive or negative emotions, but it is still the light itself that allows us to see the gold and not our mindsets, attitudes, or beliefs.

Based upon my own personal experience, I can tell you that emotions are far more than just emotions. They are not just trivial feelings that should be dismissed and trivialized such as thinking something along the lines of:

"Welp, I might feel miserable, but work needs to get done anyway and this is a good and beautiful life to live." I have had horrible crippled nightmare states and they were literally horrible far beyond anything imaginable. Likewise, my positive emotions were literally profoundly beautiful states of mind for me since they were literally profoundly beautiful emotional value judgments that made moments and things in my life perceived as profoundly beautiful. But there is simply no way that the rational value judgments themselves possess the profound joys, beauty, and misery that my emotional states offer me.

I could clearly tell this is the truth and there is no denying it since I have compared the rational value judgments to my emotions and it is clear as day to me that the rational value judgments themselves are nothing more than just empty words in my life that do not possess the power of sheer goodness, love, joy, beauty, badness, and misery to them. Our emotions are exclamations (i.e. drives) of value in our lives. A good rational value judgment alone does not possess any power, or drive, of sheer goodness that our positive emotions, the emotional value judgments of good value, offer us.

The same idea applies to negative emotions. Therefore, that is the reason why it doesn't matter what rational value judgments you have; it can only be our emotions themselves that bring the real power of value to our lives. If you have no exclamation of value in your life whatsoever, even on a small level, then how can your life possess any real value? It can't! For that very reason, this is why a rational value judgment of good value in your life during a negative emotional state cannot bring your life any real good value as long as there is no exclamation of good value which would be the positive emotion. Emotions are forms of motivation and it can only be the motivated form of value that can give our lives real value. Like I said, mindsets themselves are not real forms of motivation, but merely intentions and choices.

Here is another quote from the neuroscientist/skeptic which makes my point, but is something I disagree with when it comes to the idea that our rational value judgments can give our lives real value as long as we have emotions:

I have heard you mention someone who said that living a life without emotions can still be a good quality life. I disagree. That person fails to understand that we are literally not capable of changing our outlook when we are in a state of anhedonia, when we lack Biochemical Emotions. His advice is as valid as saying to a blind man, "Just will yourself to see." Once you get to a place where your neurochemicals begin to function properly, only then does it become possible to change your outlook. Your brain requires a jumpstart first.

When your Biochemical Emotions are dysfunctional, no Emotional Viewpoint will convince you that your life has value. That's not how our brains work, and this portion of your theory is correct. Even if your BEs are minimally functional, that would put you in a state of being able to form an EVP (Emotional Viewpoint)...it would be enough of a state for you to bootstrap yourself into fully functioning Biochemical Emotions, and a normal and healthy emotional cycle of both BE and EVP. But you are correct in saying that functional BE are a requirement.

Remember that most people responding to you have never suffered from true clinical depression; they don't know what it's like to experience anhedonia, and their judgments are coming from brains that have always had functioning Biochemical Emotions. You and I know all too well that it's impossible to understand this living Hell unless you've experienced it.

So, you admit that value judgments alone are no way to live without the emotions.

Of course! You can still make value judgments (make an Emotional Viewpoint), but they will be meaningless. For example, if you are in a state of anhedonia, you are capable of thinking, "I know that eating a properly balanced diet has good value for my life," and knowing that your value judgment is correct. But without Biochemical Emotions, you don't care. You have no motivation to follow that Emotional Viewpoint, because it is the Biochemical Emotions that provide the motivation.

By this, you are implying that value judgments themselves do not allow us to perceive value and that it is instead the emotions that do.

No, I'm not. The Emotional Viewpoint allows us to perceive good value, but by itself, it is insufficient to allow us to experience that good value. Let me break it down:

Emotional Viewpoint allows us to perceive good value, but not experience good value. The EVP is the rational analysis of value, simply the logical voice that integrates information about a person, object, idea, or event, then quantifies its value as good, bad, or neutral. But our BEs have their own value judgments. We cannot solely rely on these types of value judgments lest we cause harm and wrongdoing to ourselves and/or others.

Biochemical Emotions allow us to both perceive good value and experience good value. The BEs are the visceral feelings of value, the sensory apparatus by which we interact with a person, object, idea, or even, then quantify its value as good, bad, or neutral.

Does that make sense? This is why either one by itself cannot provide true happiness. Simply thinking, "This has good value," does not allow you to experience its good value. At the same time, experiencing what the BEs decide is good value (without the EVP) can be dangerous to us. We need both "voices."

Our BEs are precious, priceless, and irreplaceable. They are what makes us human.

[Divine Insight]

First off, all I am saying here is that our emotions allow us to judge things and situations as being good or bad which I define as seeing the good and bad value.

So far so good. I don't disagree with this. However this does nothing more than saying that emotions are required to make emotional evaluations and judgements.'

This says nothing about those judgements or evaluations being anything more than subjective "emotional opinions".

So thus far we have not made any progress at all toward your ultimate argument that emotions allow us to see any absolute good and bad in the real world. Right now we are just talking about subjective emotional evaluations. Nothing new here.

Most people would think that, having no emotions at all would render us into a position where no rational value judgment would work to bring our lives real value. They would say that we either need positive emotions or negative emotions in order to formulate a form of rational value judgment that would bring our lives real value (allow us to see value) since rational value judgments alone without any emotions will not work. It's that very reason why many artists believe that negative emotions can allow them to have good value in their lives through creating their works of art. Many skeptics and neuroscientists would tell you that we need emotions in our lives. Otherwise, without emotions, then our lives would truly be empty.

Again, no argument here. But again, this does not lead to the conclusion that any absolute good or bad exists.

All you've done thus far is make a purely secular argument for why emotions are required to make subjective emotional evaluations. I don't disagree with this.

But I think they are wrong when they say that having emotions allows the rational value judgments to become real perceived value in our lives. Just as how having no emotions at all would render your life completely empty which means that we need them to give our lives real value, then having the emotions themselves also dictates the value of our lives and our rational value judgments alone, even while we have emotions, do not dictate the perceived value of our lives. Given this, emotions would have to be the only way we can judge things as being good or bad. Positive emotions are the only way we can judge things as being good and negative emotions are the only way we can judge things as being bad.

You have already conceded this to be false when you acknowledged that different people have different emotional reactions to different things.

You have also agreed that we can change our emotional perception of things over time with maturity, or by simply leaning of or accepting a new perspective on things.

Therefore we clearly are not using emotions as the ultimate basis of our judgement of what we subjectively consider to be good or bad. And it therefore cannot be true that there exists some absolute good or bad values in the real world that are waiting to be discovered via our ability to see them through our perceived emotional experiences.

So here you are beating a dead horse to no avail.

So, even if we were in nothing but a negative emotional state, then we could actually not judge anything in our lives as being good. If you were to judge something in your life as being good while in nothing but a negative emotional state and there was no positive emotion there, then we would not define that as being a value judgment of good value. It would just be the thought of good value, but no real judgment. Remember, I said earlier that emotions are the same thing as value judgments since they are emotional value judgments and that thoughts themselves of joy, suffering, water, happiness, sounds, visuals, etc. were just ideas of these things. Therefore, this means that our rational value judgments are not actual value judgments, but are instead ideas of value judgments while it can only be our emotions which are the real value judgments.

But we have already established that this is false.

We have already established that we can change how we emotionally feel about something after having gained a better intellectual understanding of the situation. Therefore are emotional cannot be our "real value judgements".

Emotions are clearly something we feel after we have already judged something to be good or bad. So emotions are actually secondary to our intellectual judgements of what we deem to be good or bad.

So here you aren't even beating a dead horse. Now you are beating that place where a dead horse used to be laying but the body of the horse has long since been removed.

Since we and our lives are nothing without our emotions, then this means we are insignificant compared to our emotions and we are not the ones in charge here. It is instead our emotions which are in charge of the value of our lives. It would be no different than a puppet and a master. Without the master pulling the strings, then the puppet is lifeless. But when the master is animating the puppet, the puppet, even though it has come to life, does not call the shots.

These are faulty analogies.

To begin with it's not emotions that give our lives meaning. It's our subjective experience that gives our lives meaning. Emotions are merely one of those subjective experiences. If we had no emotions but we were still experiencing life who are you to say that our lives would be nothing? We would still be having experiences. We just wouldn't be reacting emotionally to them.

Does it require emotions to feel physical pain? I think not. We may indeed have a very negative emotional reaction to physical pain. But the emotion is not the experience of the pain itself.

So emotions are not the be all and end all of our existence as you seem to be suggesting. And your analogy with a puppet doesn't even work at all. It's an extremely failed analogy.

It is still the master who is in charge. This puppet analogy expresses the value of our lives either being dead and lifeless (nonexistent) without our emotions (our master), or us having real value in our lives, but the value being dictated solely by our master, the emotions. I will apply this puppet analogy to my gold analogy by saying that the light from the light source whether it be the sun, a flashlight, or a torch would be our master since it allows us to see the gold in the pitch black cave. We can either dim the light or brighten it just as how we could choose to do certain things that trigger positive or negative emotions, but it is still the light itself that allows us to see the gold and not our mindsets, attitudes, or beliefs.

But your puppet analogy already fails on many levels. For one thing our emotions are not the master of our lives. We've already established that we can take control of our emotions and manage them. We can even change them base on intellectual analysis of given situations. Therefore we are not puppets to our emotions.

So your puppet master analogy fails miserably.

Based upon my own personal experience, I can tell you that emotions are far more than just emotions. They are not just trivial feelings that should be dismissed and trivialized such as thinking something along the lines of:

"Welp, I might feel miserable, but work needs to get done anyway and this is a good and beautiful life to live." I have had horrible crippled nightmare states and they were literally horrible far beyond anything imaginable. Likewise, my positive emotions were literally profoundly beautiful states of mind for me since they were literally profoundly beautiful emotional value judgments that made moments and things in my life perceived as profoundly beautiful. But there is simply no way that the rational value judgments themselves possess the profound joys, beauty, and misery that my emotional states offer me.

I could clearly tell this is the truth and there is no denying it since I have compared the rational value judgments to my emotions and it is clear as day to me that the rational value judgments themselves are nothing more than just empty words in my life that do not possess the power of sheer goodness, love, joy, beauty, badness, and misery to them. Our emotions are exclamations (i.e. drives) of value in our lives. A good rational value judgment alone does not possess any power, or drive, of sheer goodness that our positive emotions, the emotional value judgments of good value, offer us.

The same idea applies to negative emotions. Therefore, that is the reason why it doesn't matter what rational value judgments you have; it can only be our emotions themselves that bring the real power of value to our lives. If you have no exclamation of value in your life whatsoever, even on a small level, then how can your life possess any real value? It can't! For that very reason, this is why a rational value judgment of good value in your life during a negative emotional state cannot bring your life any real good value as long as there is no exclamation of good value which would be the positive emotion. Emotions are forms of motivation and it can only be the motivated form of value that can give our lives real value. Like I said, mindsets themselves are not real forms of motivation, but merely intentions and choices.

While it may be true that you are personally overwhelmed by emotions to the point where you feel as though your are a puppet to your emotions it doesn't follow that this is a standard human condition of all humans.

In this case you are simply falling into the fallacy that your personal subjective experiences somehow represent all of humanity. Sorry, but that's an extremely misguided notion.

~~~~~

I have to get to work. I don't see where your arguments hold any water. And your analogies aren't making any sense either. So at this point I see no more point in wasting my time continuing to argue with someone who is clearly beating a dead horse.

Your arguments trying to make a connection between human emotions and some imagined absolute values of good and bad, simply aren't holding water.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[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 am just here to express my worldview and converse with others on it if they are interested despite the fact that my worldview is ingrained within me due to my personal and profound experience. But I will address what you said with my hunger/thirst analogy. You can do all the things in life that would imply that you were hungry or thirsty even if you weren't hungry and thirsty just as how all the factors that would imply good and bad value independent of positive and negative emotions can be evidenced in this world. But, again, that does not mean that you are hungry or thirsty or that you have real good and bad value judged/perceived in your life independent of your positive and negative emotions. After all, there are many people who believe in false ideas all the time such as Thor the God of Thunder. These people have lived their lives as though Thor was real. But Thor was actually not real. So, just because everything seems to add up to a certain idea being true does not make that idea true.

One last thing here. If you felt a negative emotion (an emotional bad value judgment) and you used a rational good value judgment, then this just creates a big mess here since you have two value judgments going on at once. It's no different than if a sighted person was seeing colors, smelling a certain scent, and hearing a certain noise who, at the same time, had the thought of those colors, that scent, and that noise. 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. Lastly, you say that I am beating up the ground where a dead horse was long removed. Actually, it would be like I am at an ancient, forgotten place. You are right. 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.

[bluethread]

First off, all I am saying here is that our emotions allow us to judge things and situations as being good or bad which I define as seeing the good and bad value. Most people would think that, having no emotions at all would render us into a position where no rational value judgment would work to bring our lives real value. They would say that we either need positive emotions or negative emotions in order to formulate a form of rational value judgment that would bring our lives real value (allow us to see value) since rational value judgments alone without any emotions will not work. It's that very reason why many artists believe that negative emotions can allow them to have good value in their lives through creating their works of art. Many skeptics and neuroscientists would tell you that we need emotions in our lives. Otherwise, without emotions, then our lives would truly be empty.

This at it's root is the argument of romanticism. It elevates the urge to act(emote) to supremacy. You refer to neuroscientists. Well, according to neuroscience, the emotional center of the brain sorts various inputs to determine that which requires the most immediate response, based on inputs from other parts of the brain. Some of those inputs are rational, some are visceral, some memorial, and some are just based on well worn pathways in the limbic system. So, from that prospective, I would think that one could not really establish a consistent relationship between emotion and values.

If one then takes your next step and equate "good" feelings with the moral good and bad feelings with the moral bad, is the hedonistic approach. The problem there is that often "good" feelings can place one in danger by giving one a false sense of security. Also, "bad" feelings often occur when one is confronted with a moral dilemma. Considering those dilemmas to be morally bad, simply because one feels "bad" leads one to adopt the "unexamined life", which Socrates considered to be a life not worth living. So, that is also not sufficient for establishing what is the moral "good".

I personally see the moral "good" as constitutional rather than biological. One can establish a moral "good" for oneself, but even that is basically still a two party contract, since it requires self awareness, i.e. the ability to look at oneself as if one were another person. An example of constitutional morality is HaTorah, were tov, which is translated as "good", is that which is proposed by Adonai and accepted by His people. It is not dependent on how one feels about it, but one's relationship with another. That is also why the two greatest commandments speak of relationships rather than feelings. To be clear, when the Scriptures speak of love, they are generally speaking of actions and not feelings.

[The Transcended Omniverse]

[Replying to post 29 by bluethread]

Thanks for your response. Since the previous member I was having a discussion with might have given up on this conversation, please refer to my previous post I have just made and respond to that one since it is, by far, my most important post.