Misty wrote:[quote="Youngeqp]
A child comes out of the womb crying. It's more than likely just an instinctual response to birth, having nothing to do with emotion. Then again, maybe the child cries because it had felt is first emotion; fear.
I have given birth to 4 live children and not one of them came out of the womb crying. A nurse or doctor usually smacks the infant on the butt to enhance it to breathe and it starts to cry after it catches its breathe. Emotions are innate to the human and animals, and maybe to all life forms.
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Agreed. The ability to feel emotions are innate to most forms of life. Because emotions are nothing but chemical reactions in the body. And most of us possess these chemicals. But that doesn't mean that you automatically feel emotions. First you must corn a perception that can activate that chemical reaction
-- Updated November 22nd, 2016, 9:11 am to add the following --
Burning ghost wrote:Take away sensory input and you take away the brain. Of course without any sense there is no sense.
Emotion is probably best scientifically viewed as a bodily feeling such as with fear where we feel tense and our heartbeat rises.
If I stab someone in the arm and tell them I am going to kill them I don't also say "Stop whimpering! It is just chemicals in your head you don't actually "feel" anything!".
We can say the s@me for someone who sees ghosts attacking them, or has some kind of psychotic episode. We can tell them all we like itbis not real, but that doesn't make it less real to them.
It is interesting to think about empathy and how we attend to the world with this quality. We have the natural ability to imagine ourselved with "overthereness" or "as suchness". This ties in to our social inclinations. In a world of inanimate objects it intrigues me to contemplate such things (with my capacity to model the world jabotu myself). This is the key point, we model the world from a pregiven structure that we are. We do not emptily absorb the world about us we integrate.
I am trying to highlight the "habituation" of scientific culture here which has historically since Decartes "suffered" (or rather been under the gaze of) dualistic notions of the universe and ideas of "inner" and "outer" perpetuated with great success in science by adherance to objectivity.
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Ok. This sounds more like a philosophical discussion than an argument, which is good, I don't see that much on here. I agree worth your statement on emotions. Though I do wonder what comes first; does the release of emotional causing chemicals activate the physical bodily changes, or does the physical bodily changes activate the emotional chemicals.
And the only truths or reality is that which is true or real to the individual. From the standpoint of the individual of course.
I have trouble feeling empathy naturally. When I want to feel for, I usually meditate and consciously envision myself in their situation, but it takes effort. I relate to the world of ideas, concepts and theories far more than to the world of people and things. I consider myself an observer. And my world is objectivity. I can argue any side.
The only part where I'm not 100% with you is when you say that we model the world from a pregiven structure that we are. And that we do not emptily absorb the world around us as we integrate. I agree 50%.
I believe that no one is born with any conception of personality. No pregiven structure. As a child grows it learns by mimicry, trial And error, and various other methods. In the early stages they are just a sponge soaking up information. Then later once they begin to understand the information that they have accumulated, I believe it is then that they start to turn their gaze inward and realize that they have wants and needs different from others and so noticing that they are different and accepting it they then begin to structure the data that they intake and mix and match it with their perceptible of themselves.