On the Self-Deception of the Human Heart
All thinking animals (such as birds and mammals) appear to be hardwired to try to improve their emotional state. That one seeks after the "good" and tries to avoid the "bad" seem to be intrinsic to what "good" and "bad" are. Thus, hedonism is the default value system for animals such as ourselves.
Hedonism works fine for most animals because they aren't as smart as us and have very limited ability to imagine good and bad beyond their physical needs. But humans have imagination, so that we can invent good and bad that have no relation to our actual needs.
The emotional logic of hedonism (here just meaning to seek after good feeling for its own sake) is thus circular. We often have thoughts (usually unconsciously) that go like this: "I believe in X. Believing in X makes me feel good. Feeling good is intrinsically good. I will believe in X more." Nowhere in this thought process is there a check to see if X is actually true.
It seems to me that the most generalized way of avoiding belief in falsehoods that feel good is to disbelieve in the statement, "Feeling good is intrinsically good." This would mean belief in an objective morality. That means that there is a distinction between what is actually good and what feels good. There is no concept of "truth" in the absence of an objective morality, because then there would be no value to tell you not to believe whatever makes you feel good. For a hedonist (which is what most people are), there is no difference between what is true and what makes them feel good. But a genuinely truthful person has to be willing to feel pain in order to know what is true.
Having hard life circumstances helps in being honest, even without much self-reflection. If life punishes you harshly for believing in foolishness (such as by denying you food or turning you into a social outcast), then it does not take a philosopher to figure out that one needs to change one's behavior. It seems to me that rich people can often be the most foolish (especially if they did not have to work hard to earn their wealth), because their wealth protects them from the consequences of their stupid opinions.
Choosing an objective morality is very hard, because all values are arbitrarily asserted. This is because of the is-ought dilemma. There is no way to take a physical measure of goodness. So, moral argumentation only works when the person you're arguing with already shares at least some of your arbitrarily asserted moral values. Humans are extremely social creatures, so we most-often take our objective morality from social pressure, which is usually (but not currently in the west) rooted in tradition. It is hard to do anything else but look outside of ourselves for guidance, because values are arbitrarily asserted, and the primary thing inside of ourselves that we can use as a reference is that we want to feel good, which is not a basis for an objective morality, as discussed above. So, people are always looking outside of themselves for some guidance on what they ought to do.
If humans are hardwired to lie to themselves to make themselves feel good, then it becomes clear that our opinions are not to be trusted. A great deal of our energy is spent in foolishness, and most of our personal opinions are false.
I will discuss how I believe people have dealt with this phenomena in the past. I believe that Buddhism and Christianity both deal with what I have described above. To paraphrase, it seems like Buddhism says that people cause themselves to suffer by caring about stuff outside of their control. And as for Christianity, if you define "pride" as lies we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel good, then it becomes immediately clear that pride is indeed a very big problem that humans have to deal with.
I believe that religion at its highest is conscious attention paid to one's inner state. Buddhism and Christianity (I pay most attention to Christianity because it is in my tradition) are the religions most concerned with this. This is why these are virtually the only two religions that have a concept of monasticism; these religions believe more so than other religions that inner work is good for its own sake. These two religions provide their own objective moral framework for the believer to use as a yardstick in his own inner work.
I believe that many Christians mistake their own private conscience as the voice of the Holy Spirit. This would explain how it is possible that there is so much confusion in the church, while each individual believer is so sure that he's right. Anyway, this insight made prayer easy for me. I just sit quietly without distractions and wait for some thought or "voice" to pop into my head. I consider what it has to say and maybe have a dialogue with it. This is how one orders one's inner world.
There are books that have been written on how to do inner work, but I think this is the most important piece of advice. It is simply to be quiet, not distract yourself with anything, and pay attention to the thoughts that spontaneously arise from within one's self. With practice, you will be able to teach yourself about yourself.
Since I do not believe in the supernatural claims of Christianity, taking Christian morals uncritically is not suitable for me when I have to make a moral choice in my inner work. I have come up with my own objective morality, but discussing that would require a whole other discussion. Having a proper discussion on the moral precepts in traditional moralities would as well.
I have written books and posted essays on how to order one's inner world before, but most people don't read them. So, the goal of this post is just to convince people that there is a problem in living without self-reflection (that your opinions are probably flattering lies), and that drawing conscious attention to organizing one's inner world is an activity worth doing. I figure if I can convince someone of this, then he has a mind of his own and may be able to make some progress in this regard without any further help from me.
I might call this subject "subjective science", because like in the objective science we're all familiar with, there is a structure to one's inner world which can be studied, understood, and manipulated. However, one's inner state can't be shared with other people the same way one can take measurements of physical bodies, so that one's study has to always be personal. I think the difficulty/impossibility of taking accurate measurements of one's inner state causes the scientifically minded to discount the importance of subjective experience. But this throws your life out of balance because YOU ARE your subjective experience, so discounting the importance of it discounts the importance of one's own life.
I think religious traditions are a mixture of good psychology, bad science, and lots of random circumstances from their historical development. It can be hard to separate them. I think serious religious traditions are on the edge between pseudoscience (like astrology) and a genuine area of study in its own right, which as of yet has no name. When properly understood, I think religion, psychology, and morality are all actually only one subject. I would invite you to study this subject. You can do much of the work without even getting out of your chair (although using something or another as a guide would be very helpful).
Hedonism works fine for most animals because they aren't as smart as us and have very limited ability to imagine good and bad beyond their physical needs. But humans have imagination, so that we can invent good and bad that have no relation to our actual needs.
The emotional logic of hedonism (here just meaning to seek after good feeling for its own sake) is thus circular. We often have thoughts (usually unconsciously) that go like this: "I believe in X. Believing in X makes me feel good. Feeling good is intrinsically good. I will believe in X more." Nowhere in this thought process is there a check to see if X is actually true.
It seems to me that the most generalized way of avoiding belief in falsehoods that feel good is to disbelieve in the statement, "Feeling good is intrinsically good." This would mean belief in an objective morality. That means that there is a distinction between what is actually good and what feels good. There is no concept of "truth" in the absence of an objective morality, because then there would be no value to tell you not to believe whatever makes you feel good. For a hedonist (which is what most people are), there is no difference between what is true and what makes them feel good. But a genuinely truthful person has to be willing to feel pain in order to know what is true.
Having hard life circumstances helps in being honest, even without much self-reflection. If life punishes you harshly for believing in foolishness (such as by denying you food or turning you into a social outcast), then it does not take a philosopher to figure out that one needs to change one's behavior. It seems to me that rich people can often be the most foolish (especially if they did not have to work hard to earn their wealth), because their wealth protects them from the consequences of their stupid opinions.
Choosing an objective morality is very hard, because all values are arbitrarily asserted. This is because of the is-ought dilemma. There is no way to take a physical measure of goodness. So, moral argumentation only works when the person you're arguing with already shares at least some of your arbitrarily asserted moral values. Humans are extremely social creatures, so we most-often take our objective morality from social pressure, which is usually (but not currently in the west) rooted in tradition. It is hard to do anything else but look outside of ourselves for guidance, because values are arbitrarily asserted, and the primary thing inside of ourselves that we can use as a reference is that we want to feel good, which is not a basis for an objective morality, as discussed above. So, people are always looking outside of themselves for some guidance on what they ought to do.
If humans are hardwired to lie to themselves to make themselves feel good, then it becomes clear that our opinions are not to be trusted. A great deal of our energy is spent in foolishness, and most of our personal opinions are false.
I will discuss how I believe people have dealt with this phenomena in the past. I believe that Buddhism and Christianity both deal with what I have described above. To paraphrase, it seems like Buddhism says that people cause themselves to suffer by caring about stuff outside of their control. And as for Christianity, if you define "pride" as lies we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel good, then it becomes immediately clear that pride is indeed a very big problem that humans have to deal with.
I believe that religion at its highest is conscious attention paid to one's inner state. Buddhism and Christianity (I pay most attention to Christianity because it is in my tradition) are the religions most concerned with this. This is why these are virtually the only two religions that have a concept of monasticism; these religions believe more so than other religions that inner work is good for its own sake. These two religions provide their own objective moral framework for the believer to use as a yardstick in his own inner work.
I believe that many Christians mistake their own private conscience as the voice of the Holy Spirit. This would explain how it is possible that there is so much confusion in the church, while each individual believer is so sure that he's right. Anyway, this insight made prayer easy for me. I just sit quietly without distractions and wait for some thought or "voice" to pop into my head. I consider what it has to say and maybe have a dialogue with it. This is how one orders one's inner world.
There are books that have been written on how to do inner work, but I think this is the most important piece of advice. It is simply to be quiet, not distract yourself with anything, and pay attention to the thoughts that spontaneously arise from within one's self. With practice, you will be able to teach yourself about yourself.
Since I do not believe in the supernatural claims of Christianity, taking Christian morals uncritically is not suitable for me when I have to make a moral choice in my inner work. I have come up with my own objective morality, but discussing that would require a whole other discussion. Having a proper discussion on the moral precepts in traditional moralities would as well.
I have written books and posted essays on how to order one's inner world before, but most people don't read them. So, the goal of this post is just to convince people that there is a problem in living without self-reflection (that your opinions are probably flattering lies), and that drawing conscious attention to organizing one's inner world is an activity worth doing. I figure if I can convince someone of this, then he has a mind of his own and may be able to make some progress in this regard without any further help from me.
I might call this subject "subjective science", because like in the objective science we're all familiar with, there is a structure to one's inner world which can be studied, understood, and manipulated. However, one's inner state can't be shared with other people the same way one can take measurements of physical bodies, so that one's study has to always be personal. I think the difficulty/impossibility of taking accurate measurements of one's inner state causes the scientifically minded to discount the importance of subjective experience. But this throws your life out of balance because YOU ARE your subjective experience, so discounting the importance of it discounts the importance of one's own life.
I think religious traditions are a mixture of good psychology, bad science, and lots of random circumstances from their historical development. It can be hard to separate them. I think serious religious traditions are on the edge between pseudoscience (like astrology) and a genuine area of study in its own right, which as of yet has no name. When properly understood, I think religion, psychology, and morality are all actually only one subject. I would invite you to study this subject. You can do much of the work without even getting out of your chair (although using something or another as a guide would be very helpful).
Comments (54)
It all comes down to "why do anything?". Once you go through the dialectic, it leads to questioning procreation and survival. And rightfully, it questions modern secular philosophies like hedonism, "economics as religion", and existentialism. This doesn't mean to then turn to the warm embrace of religion. That is a falsehood as well.
However, the universality of some religious ideas (the One, Nirvana, etc.) can counteract the absurdity of minutia-mongering. If you JUST figured out how that transmission works, you would be a better person, more useful. If you JUST figured out how to start an innovative X, more useful. If you JUST figured out how to solve the meaning and essence of words (philosophy of language debates), or the best physics model (theoretical physics debates), or know the intricate details of any subject, you will be edified with your knowledge. You will be BETTER, you will be USEFUL. QUESTION ALL OF THIS THINKING, whether you think minutia-mongering is more USEFUL, makes you BETTER, or you think MEANING comes from delving deeper into the minutia of a topic at hand you think is important.
As for the "religious experience", people generally seem to mean "flow states" or "meditative psychological states". These are ways to preoccupy the chatter of the restless mind.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I agree that a lot of human and animal motivation and behavior is hardwired, but I think your take is over-simplistic. As I understand it, animal, including human, behavior doesn't aim at improving their "emotional state." It aims at maintaining the equilibrium of their living systems - homeostasis. Emotions are, among other things, a sign that things are out of balance and a motivation to act.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
This is confusing. You say you are looking for objective morality, but you also acknowledge that moral values are arbitrary. Perhaps a better word would be "formal" rather than "objective."
Quoting Brendan Golledge
This is one of those presumptuous statements I was talking about. As I've said, we are not hardwired to make ourselves feel good by lying. Can our opinions be trusted? Sure, maybe, sometimes, often. This is the biggest issue in western philosophy and you've side-stepped it with six words - our opinions are not to be trusted. You say we spend a lot our time in foolishness - more pontification on your part.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
Now we get into the part where I agree with some of what you say. My goal in life is to become more self-aware, what you call paying conscious attention to my inner state, and philosophy is one of the ways I pursue that goal. I can't speak with any authority about Buddhism or Christianity, but I question your assertion those two religions are the ones most concerned with that. My personal adult experience is with Taoism, and, as I understand it, it is all about self-awareness.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
You describe your inner world as if it's the only way to see these things. It's not. On the other hand, I also have experienced that voice pop into my head. For me, that voice is not how I "order my inner world." It is a sign that I have done so.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
That's my cue to roll out one of my favorite quotes. I try to use it at least once a month here on the forum.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
Such disrespectful arrogance. Why should anyone listen to you?
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I don't disagree that it might be difficult to study our and other's inner lives, but it certainly is not impossible. We do it all the time - colloquially and scientifically.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I don't know what this means.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
This doesn't strike me as a particularly true or particularly useful way of looking at things.
Sounds like a fairly conservative take on good. I am uncertain what 'good' means and how it can be identified. The only thing I can say is that to cause suffering deliberately would appear to be bad. Does it follow that to prevent suffering is good?
Aren't all human choices motivated by wanting to feel satisfied in some way, regardless of whether it involves pleasure or pain? Isn't that why we have the idea of psychological egoism? Even when people act in ways that appear to be self-sacrificing or aimed at benefiting others, they are actually motivated by the pursuit of personal satisfaction, whether it be through direct pleasure, the avoidance of guilt, or the fulfilment of a sense of duty.
Doing good to satisfy a philosophy or please a god would ultimately seem to be a pursuit of personal pleasure. Do you think one can transcend self-interest?
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I'm not sure in what sense you mean this. Most people are not overly concerned by what is true. I would say a lot of hedonists I know feel some guilt about having pleasure while a relative or some other people are suffering. But they will justify or work to overlook this.
Considering that psychology is a science, your statement there seems a bit incoherent.
I think we could reasonably say, that history shows religious traditions disseminate passable folk-psychologies, as evidenced by the fact that there are societies still maintaining those traditions.
However, to suggest that religious traditions result in good understanding of psychology, seems rather naive to me. Not to say that consideration of religious perspectives doesn't contribute to psychological insight, but I could tell you horror stories about the results of a strongly religion based 'understanding' of psychology.
The world of science and technology is full of its own horror stories.
Granted, but not clearly relevant to what I was interested in discussing with .
Contentious statement. First, there is no way of knowing, or of testing, whether animals have emotional states. Thinking animals is also a contentious claim, as what thinking implies, and whether animals are capable of it, is vaguely defined and probably untestable. Then the first paragraph glides directly into animals such as ourselves, when it is precisely self-consciousness, language and abstract thought that differentiates h.sapiens from other organisms. Ergo the argument is based on questionable foundations.
You sound like a behaviorist. Have you ever spent much time around animals?
This OP contains many sweeping claims.
It is clear you have a negative attachment to behaviorism. That's why I found it ironic that you sounded like a behaviorist.
:grin:
I am surprised, shocked actually, to hear you say this. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has seen animals, much less owned them as pets, would not understand that animals have the same kinds of emotions we do and that those emotions fill the same role as ours. To deny this conflicts with with my personal experience and my understanding of ethology, human psychology, and biology. Evolution does not build new genetic and organic structures from nowhere. It builds them out of what is already there. The bones of our inner ears started out as the jaw bones of fish. Ditto with our mental capacities.
I don't propose we get into a discussion about this here. I'm interested in the subject but I'm not qualified to make my case any better than I have here. It would also be out of the scope of this discussion as expressed in the OP.
I think it is relevant. You say the validity of the psychological understanding expressed by religious beliefs is somehow invalid because of the consequences of actions by religious institutions. If that's true, and I don't think it is, the same can be said for the physical, chemical, and technological knowledge resulting from science.
This sounds like the No True Scottish Terrier fallacy.
No, I didn't say anything about actions by religious institutions.
You wrote:
Quoting wonderer1
How is that different from what I said? Perhaps you can provide an example of one of the horror stories.
My father, shortly before he entered seminary, spanked me until I was black and blue when I was six months old because I wouldn't stop crying, and my mother stayed with him.
I'm sorry it happened to you, but I don't see how it is relevant to your point. Both religious and non-religious people do things like that.
I don't want to pry any deeper, so I'll leave it at that.
The point is that having a religious background doesn't correlate all that well with people having psychological insight.
Never having owned a Scottish Terrier, I wouldnt claim to know.
I did add that I see all sentient organisms as subjects. Whether they think or have emotional states is another matter.
I wouldn't be surprised if I made some mistakes. It felt like years ago that my opinions on things developed to the point where there was no name for what I believed, and then I just kept thinking. And then when I try to share my ideas, most people don't engage or are vacuously hostile. So, I have very little other than my own opinions of my ideas as a check on whether they are right or not.
Quoting T Clark
Well, obviously all of our instincts, desires, and emotions are wired to keep us alive. But it seems to me that the way emotions do that is that they make us try to make ourselves happy. It seems like a common-sense thing that we prefer to be happy rather than sad.
I've thought before that instincts appear to be those behaviors which act without thinking (like blinking), desires are from the body but require conscious action to act upon (like hunger), and emotions require conscious thought for both the feeling to occur and to act upon them (like happiness). I spend most of my time focusing on emotions because they are most under our control.
Quoting T Clark
That word choice may have been better. I suppose I think a morality has to seem "objective" to the believer in order to mean anything, even if in reality there are many conflicting moralities believed in by different people with no way of proving which is right.
If humans are hardwired to lie to themselves to make themselves feel good, then it becomes clear that our opinions are not to be trusted. A great deal of our energy is spent in foolishness, and most of our personal opinions are false.
Brendan Golledge
Quoting T Clark
I suppose we are very similar in that respect. I am not an expert on every religion, so I am not surprised if I neglected to mention some other religion which is more inward focused.
It seems clear at least that Christianity is more inward focused than many other religions. Take Islam, for instance. All the commands are outward focused, like professing a belief in Muhammad, taking a pilgrimage, giving to the poor, etc. The two main commandments in Christianity are to love one's neighbor as one's self and to love God with all one's heart. And the 7 deadly sins (I know this is a Catholic thing) are inward orientations of the soul rather than particular actions. And the Jewish commandments are also outward focused (although Jesus said they are aimed at loving God and neighbor). I've seen interviews from 2 different Jews who said for instance that they don't care if people hate Jews; they only care about how people treat Jews. And they said themselves that Judaism is more Earthly focused than Christianity.
Quoting T Clark
I'd never heard that quote before. Maybe I should read Franz Kafka.
Quoting T Clark
I believe values (what we care about) are the root of our emotional experience, and our emotions drive what things we think about, and what we think about drives what we do. So, studying the self is really the same as studying values. And that's really the same as morality. And this is also what religion is concerned with.
Given that there is enormous disagreement about a variety of topics which people have strong opinions about (politics, religion, economics, morality, etc), it seems clear that most people have to be wrong about much of what they believe. If 10 people have conflicting opinions about a subject, then it's clear that it's not possible for more than 1 out of 10 to be right. It is clear that this is the state of affairs for many subjects that people get worked up over. I believe that much of people's false beliefs come from pride, but I admit I have not demonstrated this.
I will give some examples of stuff that I'm guessing may not have been clear.
Starting with how we lie to ourselves: It seems to me that in whatever way a person happens to be gifted, he tends to think that that is the most important thing. For instance, a beautiful woman may think that being beautiful is most important, a smart person may think that being smart is most important (I have done this before), a physically fit person may think that being physically fit is most-important. We tend to elevate whatever we are good at and dismiss whatever we aren't good at.
Much of entertainment involves unconscious deception. It seems to me that fans of spectator sports sometimes get so worked up because they imagine that they actually have some connection to the team involved when they really don't. Video games can give a false sense of accomplishment (I have fallen prey to this). Social media gives a false sense of social validation (I think this is something more common to women). Participating in great and distant causes (like voting for a political party, or giving to a charity to help people in Africa) can be a way of feeling good about ourselves while we neglect the simple and humble things in our own lives that we have much more control over.
I came up with a pride filter once. It seems to me that the only thing that we experience having control over (whether or not free will truly exists) is our choices. So, the only thing it is proper to congratulate ourselves on is that we have made good choices. Self-congratulation about any other thing involves deception, because in reality, anything else good in our lives is outside of our control. It is better in those cases to feel grateful. I tried practicing for a few months rejecting every positive feeling about myself that did not come from choosing to do my best, and it was exhausting. I later decided that it was easier to focus positively on good things than to avoid the bad (as Paul says once in the New Testament).
On the feeling of offense: It seems to me that people can only ever be offended by the truth. If you will tell a beautiful woman, "You're ugly and no man will ever want you," she'll probably pay it no attention. Same as if you told Elon Musk for Bill Gates, "You're a poor stupid loser." So, whenever a person gets offended by an idea, he is admitting that he finds truth in what he is offended by.
It is also possible to be offended by circumstances rather than ideas. For instance, most people probably find flat-Earthism to be ridiculous, and so they aren't offended by the idea. But they may get offended if their kids were to be taught the subject at school.
On harsh pointless judgment: It seems to me that the emotional motivation for harsh judgment is distraction from our own faults. For a truly humble person, if, for instance, he saw a fat smoker on the street, he'd probably notice that those were bad things, and then move onto the next thing without being bothered. Or maybe he'd feel sorry for the guy. However, a person who maybe had a drinking problem (but was a healthy weight and didn't smoke), might see the fat smoker and think, "That guy has no self-control. What a loser." The motivation for this kind of judgement is to distract from one's own faults. I think sometimes you have to judge, such as when you decide whether to work at a certain company or whether to marry a certain person. But in those situations, there is a specific purpose for the judgment. If one judges just for the sake of it, then there's a pretty good chance that whatever you throw at the other person is actually an arrow pointed right back at yourself.
I will quit here because I'm supposed to be working.
Perhaps this is a problem with considering a monastic life to be conducive to developing psychological insight? Considered from a neuroscientific perspective, a monastic life could be considered to be starving one's brain of the input that comes with interacting with diverse people in diverse situations. It doesn't seem to me like a monastic life would be very conducive to developing robust intuitons regarding human psychology.
To take it back to Christianity, do you think the diversity of people who Jesus is purported to have associated with might have been relevant to Jesus being particularly psychologically insightful?
There's a kind of companion quote which I prefer and it comes from Pascal - All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Re Kafka - I suspect that if you don't discover him in your 20's, he may be less affecting. I like The Metamorphosis and The Trial best.
Quoting wonderer1
I suspect the lions share of those intuitions are formed by early adulthood , which may explain why philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were able to generate profound psychological insights while living essentially monastic lives.
I am a big fan of introspection, so I have no problem with looking within for answers, but that doesn't compensate for opinions that are just objectively wrong.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
You make two unrelated statements. First you say the way emotions help keep us alive is to try to make ourselves happy. This is mostly wrong. Then you say that we prefer to be happy than sad, which is generally true, but irrelevant.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
These are reflexes, not instincts.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
Desires are from all over the place. Some are definitely instinctive others are learned or socially mediated. Acting on those desires may be based on conscious decisions but are not necessarily. In my experience, conscious action is more likely to restrict the fulfilling of desires than support them.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
This seems like a very simplistic analysis. More than that - it's presumptuous unless you are a student of religion, which you indicate you are not.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I've never been able to read Kafka's books. They are bleak and depressing and I find their lessons obscure unless it is just that we should all despair. I don't know where the quote I provided comes from.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I disagree with just about everything in this paragraph.
Hardly. Surely not in the sense he is meaning there: giving explanation to natural events (Zeus and lightning).
Quoting T Clark
The paragraph does seem to be consonant with recent thinking on the relation between affectivity, cognition and values. For instance, enactivist approaches to cognitive psychology insist that cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world , and that affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it,
You said yourself in a later post that it's obvious that dogs have feelings.
When I think about what is actually happening when I feel an emotion, it seems clear that it is impossible for it to occur unless some cognitive process has taken place. Take anger, for instance. It seems to me that anger happens when you realize that some entity is attacking something that you care about. How can you figure this out without using your brain? If you aren't awake and paying attention, then it's impossible to feel angry no matter how people may be trying to hurt you at that moment. This is different than physical sensations like hunger and pain, which occur without your conscious participation. So it seems to me that that thinking and feeling go together. And whereas emotions cannot occur at all without a thinking process, emotions in turn guide the topic of thoughts (such as when you're angry, you're likely to think of ways of hurting the person who made you angry).
Oh, and I wasn't thinking of "animals like ourselves" as including a great ability for abstract thought. I was thinking only that they have some capacity to model the world and to feel emotions as a result. It seems obvious to me that all mammals and birds can do this. Reptiles and fish seem to have at least the ability to feel fear and anger. If they didn't, then why would they run/swim away from danger, or why would a crocodile attack things that approach their nests? That they feel fear and anger in a similar manner that we do seems like the most obvious answer.
Positivist approaches in psychology were based on the same assumptions concerning human behavior, which is why they excluded unobservable and untestable concepts like emotion and cognition from their models. Fortunately, things have changed significantly with respect to what is considered empirically testable for both humans and other animals.
Quoting schopenhauer1
As for the first paragraph, it seems to me that all values are arbitrarily asserted. So you have to arbitrarily decide whether life is worth living, and then go from there. I have decided that it is worth living.
It seems like the second paragraph is how we often get stuck looking for the "next thing".
I'm aware that religious experience often is associated with alternative states of mind, which I think are still important. I am more concerned with changing the general/usual state of mind.
Quoting Tom Storm
First paragraph. I think values are arbitrarily asserted. Although in a state of nature, before a person has developed much, it seems like good is associated with pleasure and bad is associated with pain. However, humans can learn to associate good and bad with almost anything as adults. Consciously thinking about what things we ought to consider good and bad is the point of this discussion. Because of the arbitrariness of value-assertion, using an external guide as a rule (such as a religious tradition) can be very helpful.
Second paragraph: I know subjectively speaking, I might think to myself, "I'd rather be playing video games, but it would be better for me to do the dishes," and then I will do the dishes. So my subjective experience is that I don't always do what I want. I suppose it could be argued that I get some satisfaction from doing the right thing, or that I really just don't want to feel guilty, or that I don't want to have to eat off a dirty plate later. Or maybe I choose to do the dishes because I know that otherwise my wife would do them, and I want to make things easier on her. It seems to me that if it is possible to think that I am good and therefore I do good things for myself, then it ought to be possible to think that another person is good for their own sake, and to want to do good things for that person (although this kind of thought probably requires some degree of training). It might be possible that if I didn't get some kind of personal satisfaction somewhere deep inside from helping another person, that I wouldn't do it. But my subjective experience is that I can value another person for his/her own sake.
Quoting wonderer1
I actually lived at a monastery once, and it was very useful for learning about myself. I would not have gotten the psychological insight that I have without having been at the monastery. I suppose if I lived my whole life at the monastery, however, without having had experience of the broader world, then I probably would not be as psychologically developed.
If I understand the story of Jesus correctly, he was basically a mature person and ready to do his mission by the time he was 30. Maybe he developed more after that, but it seems like he was mostly already who he was by the time he started ministering.
Quoting T Clark
I don't understand what the problem is. I would assume that most of the stuff that makes us happy would have been useful for our ancestors for staying alive, and that therefore aiming towards happiness is generally useful for our survival. This seems to me to be the same as that we prefer to be happy than sad. Where is the confusion?
Next you argue about instincts/desires/emotions. It seems to me that you are arguing about the definition of words. I realize that if you're talking about how those words are commonly used, then what I said was not right. But when I was talking about instincts/desires/emotions, I was giving definitions that I find useful for the purpose of discussion. They seem to me to be a complete description of the sensations that we feel that encourage us to do one thing or another.
Quoting T Clark
I have not studied every single religion in the world in-depth (although I do have a cursory knowledge of Taoism, which you mentioned before). I have studied Christianity a great deal. I even lived at a monastery for a few months.
Quoting T Clark
Lots of people have told me things like, "What you said is contradictory", or "I disagree", but if they don't provide an argument, then I have no reason to change my mind.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think I was made to read, "The Metamorphosis" in high school. I only understood it at the surface level that some dude turned into a bug, and that it was meant to be a horror story. If there was some kind of psychological lesson to be learned from the story, then I missed it.
Quoting Lionino
I don't think there is much knowledge of physical sciences in religion. But I do think that religion is how people understood their psychology. The morals of the people were embedded in their religious stories.
Even though I don't believe in the literal truth of these stories, I am still inspired by them sometimes. The first example that comes to mind is that in Norse mythology, all the gods know ahead of time who they are going to fight in ragnarok, and that they will all die. But they all choose to go fight anyway. This seems inspiring to me. It seems to me to be a good thing that even if things are bad and you know you can't win, it is good to fight anyway. But in real life, we don't have prophecy, so we never really know with certainty that something is hopeless, like the Norse god do.
People are born without instruction manuals. The only instruction manuals are written by other players. So, I think it's no wonder that people got everything mixed up. Ancient people likely didn't have the concepts of "objective" (existing independently of the self) and "subjective" (occurring from within the self), or the idea of the unconscious, so it's no wonder that they got everything all mixed up. Google says that the first occurrence of the word unconscious was only a few hundred years ago. It seems to me that if people didn't even have a word for a thing, then they likely didn't have the concept either. But we have the experience that thoughts and feelings come to us from we know not where. So where did people think that they came from? They thought their spontaneous inner experiences came from gods (like Aphrodite = lust and Ares = anger), or from angels and demons. So, in a certain sense, people really did experience their gods. Modern people just don't believe in their interpretations of their experiences. So, although most religious people don't know this, their religious beliefs are actually how they model their psychology.
Quoting Joshs
I don't really disagree with anything you said there. What I said was a simplification. I realize that emotions don't occur without a thinking process, or without knowledge of events. I also think that we wouldn't think much without emotions. Without some kind of stimulant like an emotion, our brains would probably just sit there doing nothing like a computer that is not receiving instruction. So in a very simplified sense, our values determine our emotional responses, our emotions determine what we think about, and we select our behavior from our thoughts.
Quoting Joshs
Part of the point of my original post was that psychology cannot be studied like a hard science because it is difficult/impossible to observe inner psychological states. I was arguing that people ought to be interested in their own psychology as a real subject of study, even if they have to go it alone. And people like myself who make general claims about psychology have a hard time because we can't easily demonstrate that things are the way we say they are.
Yes, I agree with this strongly. People with damage to those areas of the brain involved in emotions sometimes find themselves unable to make even the simplest decisions. There is no doubt that emotions are interwoven with all aspects of our cognitive life. But that's not what Brendan Colledge wrote. Here's what he said:
Quoting Brendan Golledge
Emotions developed early in our species evolutionary history and parts of the brain involved in emotions are located in more "primitive" areas, i.e. in the pre-cortex. In that context, what does "values are the root of our emotional experience" even mean? To over-simplify, the emotions were there first. They are part of the foundation of our thinking and were there long before consciousness.
If you want to participate effectively in philosophical discussions, you should use words as they are commonly understood. At the very least, you should specify clearly what non-standard usages you are using.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
I have provided specific arguments in my posts in this thread based on my understanding of cognitive science and psychology while you have provided nothing beyond "seems to me" based on a very incomplete understanding of both religion and science.
Quoting T Clark
It sounds like youre getting your idea of the primacy of emotion in evolutionary history from this model:
The above account suggests instead that affect, cognition and consciousness developed in tandem. The defining feature of living systems is their normative organization, the fact that they are purpose-driven to maintain their form of life in changing circumstances. This doesnt mean that amoebas have values in the same way that humans do, but that affectivity and sense-making work together to produce goal-oriented directionality.
Are you particularly concerned by what we use as an external guide? Isn't this itself arbitrary too? We can pick secular humanism, a political ideology or fundamentalist Islam. How do we know which oughts and ought nots within a system are useful or 'correct'. Seems we have to step outside of the external guide to make an assessment.
Where we obtain our oughts from is itself a curious thing - it appears to be contingent and may have nothing to do with right or wrong (in a more transcendent sense), just perceptions of right or wrong. Isn't it the case that oughts and ought nots are located in the contingent system of values we gain through culture and experience? Some of these might coalesce into a system of sorts. Isn't morality essentially an intersubjective agreement, with many outliers and willing transgressors?
I think I was clear in my previous post that emotions are involved in all aspects of our cognitive life. At the same time, it is true that every mammal that has ever existed has had emotions. Emotions were a part of animal cognition long before anything we would call consciousness had evolved.
Quoting T Clark
I happen to believe that the functionally unified, normative, goal-oriented organization of living systems is what consciousness is in its most primordial sense, so what distinguishes humans and higher animals from simpler ones isnt an all-or-nothing capacity of consciousness, but a matter of degree. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio assert that there can be no consciousness without emotion. It has also been suggested that there can be no emotion without consciousness, that unconscious affect is a non-sequitor.
Whenever we set sail on the sea of consciousness, differences in definitions are often the reefs on which our arguments run aground. I would not normally call what you have described "consciousness." That's not an argument against your position, but we are talking about different things.
Quoting T Clark
Then perhaps we must let it run aground. Beside, I think Im getting seasick.
Perhaps. I have only a superficial view of those three.
I tend to find both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard rather overwrought, and not to my taste. Still, I can see how both express things that I can understand others to find psychologically liberating, even if I don't much relate.
(Value) + (Perceived event related to that value) -> emotion
I will try to give a new example from recent experience. My wife hates it when I have holes in my clothes, and I don't care. She values how I appear to other people, and I don't. Offense is the feeling of hating facts. So, when she sees that I have holes in my clothes, she becomes offended. I see the holes, but I have no emotional response because I don't care how other people perceive me. Likewise, if my wife did not see the holes, then she would not be offended (she doesn't perceive the relevant event).
To use an old example, if you thought that somebody had stolen your money, then you'd probably be angry. This is because you (probably) care about money, and anger is the feeling that comes when you are aware that somebody is attacking something you care about. If you realized that instead you had just lost the money (change of perceived event), then you'd probably be sad rather than angry. Likewise, if you decided that you didn't care about the money (change of value), then you would not have an emotional reaction to losing it.
I think in lower animals, good = pleasure and bad = pain. However, humans, as I said in the original post, can invent all manner of good and bad separate from our immediate material needs. Love of money is an example. A wild man who grew up without the concept of money would probably have no emotional reaction (other than maybe curiosity) at being given paper bills or having them taken away.
Edit: So, to more directly answer the quote. I agree that emotions have been there for a long time, but I am arguing that values are how they operate. The most typical value assertion is that pleasure = good and pain = bad, but that humans can choose other values (although they often don't do this consciously).
I am very happy to talk about this. But based on the reception to my previous posts, I thought I'd wait for someone to bring it up rather than write a book in my original post.
I like Christian morality a lot. I think the early Christians and Jews were maybe the most interested in righteous living of any people ever. The primary area where I would disagree with them is that I don't believe in an afterlife, so that I do not like the suicidal altruism prescribed in Christianity.
I thought a lot about how I could create a moral system. It is hard when you don't have faith in the literal truth of religious stories because you can't prove your morals to another person. However, I think I have found a semi-objective basis for morality.
One observation is that it appears that only living beings have the experience of "good" and "bad". So, we can conclude that the only moral judgments that can have any effect on the material world are behavioral prescriptions for living beings. For instance, asserting that elliptical orbits are good/bad would be useless. But telling people that murder is bad is likely to have an effect on the murder rate.
Also, it is a logical truism that a moral system (or any other thing) which would destroy itself will not survive very long. So, if we want our moral system to not be in vain, then our moral system must be good at multiplying and preserving itself. This likely includes multiplying and preserving the people who believe in it, since moral systems cannot exist outside of believers.
It also seems true that, all else being equal, feeling good is better than feeling bad. Feeling good about doing good also encourages you to do more of it.
So, if we want our morals to have an effect on the world and be long-lasting, then we should have a moral system that prescribes behavior for living beings that is effective at perpetuating the morals that they believe in, and which they enjoy doing.
Purely individualistic morals are not sustainable in human societies (however appealing they may be emotionally), because all men are mortal. The individualistic morality that a person holds will die with him. The only morals that can be passed down from generation to generation are those that perpetuate the survival of the tribe that believes in them.
I like to think of these as, "God's morals," because whatever we think morality ought to be, these are probably the morals that WILL BE.
Of course, this is not a complete morality. I think it is a good basis for a morality though. It is objective whether a thing (such as yourself) exists or does not exist. So, that is a good foundation. On many particular moral issues, I try to work through what I think makes sense, and often find that I come to similar conclusions as traditional moralities. One would expect that traditional moralities are good at surviving if you think that the history of moral development in culture is an evolutionary process.
I have come up with several parallel moral rules which seem to be consistent.
One is that the above discussion seems to lead to enlightened self-interest.
I am a body -- so taking care of my health is good
I am a mind -- so learning things and otherwise using my mind is good
I am a "heart" -- so seeking after the good is good
I am a cell in a social body -- so trying to do good to my social unit (in-so-far as they are not pursuing useless and self-destructive things) is good
I am a "child of god"/"part of the universe" -- so if I think I've found some other objective meaning to my life, then it's good to do that too
Here are some rules for life that I think are the best I've come up with so far:
1. Think continually on what is good.
2. Test your ideas. Try to prove yourself wrong.
3. Do your best, and try to be content with this.
I could write a whole other post on why I like these rules. One feature of these 3 rules is that they don't posit final answers, but only ask you to seek them. It is not a coincidence that I chose these 3, because the metaphysics I came up with a few years ago says that all human experience can be decomposed into values, reason, and sensory experience. So the 3 rules engage these 3 areas.
Recently I came up with these a hierarchy of values:
1. Love truth
2. Try to survive (also help your social unit).
Later (3?) All else being equal, try to feel good
Trying to survive seems like an objective first value, because it's not possible for you to do anything else if you are dead. But I think it is hard to survive if you don't know the truth, so truth can come even earlier because it is a prerequisite. And feeling good comes last, because it's obviously good to feel good, but I don't like tricking one's self in deceitful ways into feeling good. One could argue that maybe feeling good is the 3rd value, because apart from surviving, what values you choose are kind of arbitrary (like whether you'd rather go to the movies or play a game). So, I'm not certain, but maybe nothing is in between surviving and feeling good.
A thought experiment I had a few years ago which I like is, "What's the worst that can possibly happen, and how does that compare to real life?" The worst thing I could think of at the time was that a meteor hit the Earth and killed all life. I thought, "Would Earth then be evil?" I thought that Mars has no life (so far as we know), and we don't consider it to be evil, so Earth would probably not be evil either. I thought that if the worst I can think of is not evil, then real life must be net good.
It seems to be possible to say that any positively existing thing is good, and bad is only the loss of good. For instance, we usually feel pain when our health is deteriorating. But we have to have health before we can lose it. And we typically consider murder to be bad because it takes away from the positive goodness of the life of a man. So, life is good, because God can't take anything from you that he didn't give you first.
I suppose if there were an everlasting hell where people were tortured horribly and arbitrarily forever, then that would be bad. But this is not possible in a naturalistic mindset.
I'm not aware that these ideas have a name. One name I considered giving it was, "existence philosophy".
One fun thing about the arbitrariness of value assertion is that you can assert almost anything and it will become true. For instance, I could assert, "The sky is beautiful, and seeing it is already enough to make the day worth it," and if I believe it, it will be true (at least to me). This only works though for value assertions which make no false claims about material reality. Something which I think is common in modern morality is that people tell themselves, "It is good that people are equal." I do not believe that material equality between people actually exists. So people who take this as a moral precept get offended by people who try to tell them how the world really works. I could assert to myself now, "It is very good that I have shared these ideas. If other people read them and think about them, then they are also doing good." I already feel a bit better.
Sometimes value assertion doesn't work. Like if I really wanted to do something else that I wasn't able to do (like maybe if I was single and didn't want to be), then telling yourself stuff which you don't really believe (like that I'm happy with my current life circumstances) won't work. In this case, you need to either work to improve your life circumstances (which is never 100% within your control), or do some serious introspection about what I really want out of life and why (which is always at least a little bit within your control). But if something really seems to be good, it seems to me that it's better to at least try, even if it doesn't work. Effort towards doing the good always seems praiseworthy.
I agree with this. I thought of consciousness as just being, "having a model of the self," and this can clearly occur in degrees. And as I said before, it seems to me that reason and emotion are inseparable in their operation.
I largely agree as well, but I balk at saying "inseparable". I'd say having emotions is what drives the process which results in our developing models of selves in the larger world.
Well, I wouldn't go that far either, although I'd be hard put to give much of an account of the role of emotion when I'm deep into doing electronics design. It's not something I've thought much about, and I suspect that if I were to pay more attention to the role of emotions in such a case, I'd see that emotions were playing a subtle role all along. If nothing else, I think there is a background of desire to achieve a design I'm happy with.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
You sure about that? Is the sense of why and how something matters to us ever absent from a task? Is there ever such a thing as an absence of mood? Heidegger would say no. He refers to such concepts as affect, feeling, emotion and mood as attunements:
No, it's not. "Offense" means "Annoyance or resentment brought about by a perceived insult to or disregard for oneself or one's standards or principles." You should consider she might be offended by your lack of consideration for her things that matter to her more than she is of the holes in your clothes. But I guess that's not philosophy.
Quoting Brendan Golledge
No. As I noted earlier, your understanding of ethology - animal behavior - is lacking. Animal and human emotions come from the same place, although it's true that our more developed higher cognitive functions make human emotion more highly developed.
Lots of people attempt this move. As you probably know, Sam Harris wrote a book on secular morality based around the principle of wellbeing (The Moral Landscape 2010) . As you've already suggested, if you can get people to agree upon a presupposition (or some foundational values) you can build a moral system from there. But the challenge is getting people to share those presuppositions. I'll leave this kind of task to the system builders. :wink:
I wanted to revisit this, and ask about the reading habits of these three men, and whether there was a lot of similarity between the reading habits of these three and what you would expect of religious monastics?
Even someone who superficially appears socially isolated, may be interacting with diverse others via reading and writing. I'm not sure that comparing those three to monastics is very apples to apples, but you tell me.
Quoting wonderer1
Both Heidegger and Nietzsche felt isolated from the ways of thinking of their time. Heidegger believed that Nietzsche and Holderlin were closest to his own philosophy, but that even they fell short, and Nietzsche believed that he was writing for an age to come. Certainly in Heideggers case, I think his core philosophy was developed in his 20s, and the interaction he had with his students and colleagues over the course of his life had only the most peripheral effect on the further development of his ideas. The greatest influence on his new work was his old work, not the ideas of those around him. In this sense , his intellectual life was monastic by necessity, and I think this is true of most philosophers.