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Fear, love

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  1. 1. Can you feel fear and love at the same time?

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"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear ... The one who fears is not made perfect in love." - 1 John 4:18

John was one of the better apostles, if not the best. Thank you.

 

However, over the period of history, fear was also defined as "a reverential awe toward God." Thus, most Christians think that fear and love can be concurrent. Of course, that is due to conceiving of emotions as metaphysical, or purely mental, phenomena and not actual experiences we feel at an exact moment of time, such as in a single second.

 

Splitprimary, I don't remember seeing you before. Are you an Objectivist?

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"Fear" in that sense (awe, respect, reverence) I would agree definitely can be felt along with love.

Is that what you had in mind with your question? What is your interest in this topic, does it relate to your economics stuff?

I am somewhat new, been around mostly in chat since last fall. I do consider myself an Objectivist, not 100% orthodox though.. I'm also very interested in religion and existentialism.

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"Fear" in that sense (awe, respect, reverence) I would agree definitely can be felt along with love.

Is that what you had in mind with your question? What is your interest in this topic, does it relate to your economics stuff?

I am somewhat new, been around mostly in chat since last fall. I do consider myself an Objectivist, not 100% orthodox though.. I'm also very interested in religion and existentialism.

 

That "fear" is not an emotion but merely a mental state, just like "love" could be considered a mental state of valuing someone or something. So, I would say that one can feel fear and love at the same time in the mind but not in the soul.

 

Yes, this question is directly related to my theory of Emotional Economy. In my economy, all values are categorized as either negative or positive but never both at the same time (that would be an error in the result of the heartbeat scan). From lots of research in electromagnetic/photonic/radio biology and neurocardiology, I know for a fact that emotions are physiological. A positive emotion is when your brain impulses synchronize with your heart's pulses, and a negative emotion is when there is desynchronization. The first is also known as resonance, in terms of frequency, and coherence, in terms of connection. The opposite is interference and incoherence. Logically, you cannot feel both emotions at the same time, but maybe they can switch really quickly, like possibly happens in BDSM.

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Love and hate would be two opposing emotions. If you love something, you don't hate it. If you hate something, you don't love it.

 

To take an individual as an example, you may conclude that you love and hate someone, but if you consciously and explicitly identify what you love about them and discern what you hate about them, is it the individual that you love and hate, or the characteristics that evoke the two emotions?

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That "fear" is not an emotion but merely a mental state

 

What do you mean by "not an emotion but merely a mental state"? What is the difference? I don't see why being a mental state would make something not an emotion.

And you say "that fear"- do you only mean fear as reverence is not an emotion, vs like fear as terror which would be? Maybe you're saying that reverence is not physiological? Or just that it can't be measured in the same way so wouldn't interfere with your scanner? But you also mention love as being a mental state. So if love is an emotion, then it's possible for something to be both.

 

one can feel fear and love at the same time in the mind but not in the soul

 

Confused about mind vs soul too.

 

all values are categorized as either negative or positive but never both at the same time

 

You must be using "values" there in a mathematical sense? It would be odd to use the word "value" for something negative. In the Objectivist use "value" is necessarily positive and something would either be a value (to an entity, for a purpose) or not.

I agree of course that you cannot consider an object to be both positive and negative at the same time in the same way. dream_weaver is making a good point though that you could hate or fear x about a person and love or revere y about them. Then your emotional reaction to them at a given point in time would depend on which aspect/attribute you were focusing on.

Edited by splitprimary
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Okay I checked out your Marxism thread, which cleared up some of that.

There you define emotion as: 

"a change in heart-rate that is embodied in a pulsation of the blood tissue, which is a part of the circulatory system regulated by the heart."

 

And thought/mental states as:

"a change in brain-activity that is embodied in an impulse of the nervous tissue, which is a part of the nervous system regulated by the brain."

 

I think it's problematic to ignore that these systems are actually profoundly interconnected, most notably by the endocrine system (which someone in your other thread has already begun to point out), but what you seemed to be getting at with: "Once you fear losing love, you don't have love as an emotion anymore ... at the time you fear for their safety, you don't love them ...not love as experience" is a common distinction in religion, with "faith" then being the assurance or conviction you have that causes you to act on your knowledge and pursue values, even in the momentary absence of the associated emotional state.

 

The answer to the first section of my last post then seems to be that "love" can denote the mental state or the emotion (you said "love is an emotion" and prefer to use the term that way, but told Brad he was "talking about love as valuing"). The same would probably be true of "fear". Correct?

 

———

Your definitions themselves don't imply any hierarchy, though you seem to have one:

-"That "fear" is not an emotion but merely a mental state"

-"Once you fear losing love, you don't have love as an emotion anymore. Love becomes simply a thought"

-"love is an emotion, not just a thought."

 

Although you're a physicalist ("my philosophy is physicalism, I believe that everything is physical"), and you've broken apart thought and emotion based on organ system (so that both would be physical, measurable events/experiences, taking place at specific times), for some reason emotion is being given priority; it's more important or more primary/real for you. Why is that? What makes thought- what makes a nervous system response- inferior to a cardiovascular one?

 

You also said: "thoughts of emotions... are only deceitful representations of emotions." Why are they deceitful? How does "deceit" get introduced?

 

———

 

Still very interested in your introduction of "soul":

"you can conceive of a soul as being different from mind, by focusing on soul the problem of reductionism simply goes away, and you finally become a whole person"

You're not conceiving of soul as anything metaphysical or mystical, as in dualism, so how does using this language solve any problems? How is your view different than reductionism?

Edited by splitprimary
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Splitprimary, think of a mental state is having a potential to initiate an emotion but does not necessarily lead to an emotion. An emotion is an experience you feel through your body from a change in heart rate. The problem I find with those who answer Yes on the question is that they don't differentiate emotions from thoughts because they focus on their minds instead of their souls. And with Objectivists especially, Rand's concept of soul is just that, a concept, or a mental state she calls "the sense of life." Life needs to be experienced and not merely thought about, but you cannot experience life if you only focus on thoughts.

Yes, fear as reverence is not an emotion because it is metaphysical, whereas fear as terror is an emotion because it changes your heart rate. Reverence is psychological (or neurological) and not physiological in that regard, yes. Reverence can be a change in brain-activity but not in heart rate, and so it won't be measured by the scanner. But then it makes to sense to pay with reverence. What are you going to be paying for and to whom? To God? It's a joke. You can revere non-economically by staying alone on a desert island. Hence, I don't care about such mental states. I only care about emotions and people who can feel them. The only thing that can interfere with my scanner is if you are being ambivalent and hence emotionally irrational. I believe in rational emotions (or rational programming of emotions, as Rand teaches).

Yes, if it is an emotion, it is necessary that it is also a mental state. You cannot feel emotions without initiating them from your brain! What neurologists and other "brainiacs" (my word for insane people) study is how brain initiates emotions but they forget about the actual end (i.e., emotion). As Aristotle taught, happiness is the end, and happiness is also an emotion. If you focus only on reason, you lose emotions (e.g., see Descartes), but if you focus on emotions, you also find reason. The latter is the best way to go and the way I am teaching with my economics.

Yes, I was using values in the mathematical sense. For example, loving is a positive value (as in +1 emotional point [ep] from an emotional response) and fearing is a negative value (-1 ep). In my economy both are necessary, but only one can occur at a specific transaction.

Sorry for the confusion about "fear" in the Christian definition. When you wrote "'Fear' in that sense (awe, respect, reverence)," I replied "That "fear" is not an emotion but merely a mental state." That "fear" as reverence is not an emotion. But actual fear is an emotion. The confusion of thoughts and emotions started with Peter Ramus and Rene Descartes, by the way. They surely were reductionists (the first reduced rhetoric to style and the second reduced soul to mind). Descartes and Leibniz (another reductionist, who reduced everything to imaginary "monads") also inspired Immanuel Kant. We have many problems since the Enlightenment.

The soul in my conception is very much mystical but it is also physical. I keep Aristotle's realism/mysticism as a whole physicalism without reducing it to mere "realism," which by itself can degenerate into the materialism of Kant. (Aristotle also knew that the soul, or "common sense," as he referred to it, is in the heart.) Soul is the electromagnetic field of our heart, and mind is the electromagnetic field of our brain. Both are also known as auras, but in the Western, objective sense, not in the Eastern, subjective one. I highly recommend reading A.S.Presman's foundational book Electromagnetic Fields and Life (1970) and/or the HeartMath Institute's Science of the Heart (2001).

 

I hope this clarifies what I meant. You can also read my blog, where I explain the new philosophy in great detail.

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