Greta wrote:There is an emotional difference, emotions being the link between body and mind.
Yes. I think this relates a bit to a comment I just made in the "Is There Really An Equal Amount Of Good And Bad In Everything?" topic. I think most humans need an emotional connection to the subject that they're discussing in order to find it interesting. It needs to move them. Different people find that in different ways.
Emotions, when not overly triggered, help to ground us in reality. Consider Descartes calmly performing open heart surgery on living primates, dismissing the poor animals' distress as automatic responses, that is, lacking in emotion. Without emotions, we can go off track, so we must extrapolate and use logic to fill the gaps and become "grounded".
Yes, as was being discussed in that topic, it's difficult to be sure how we would behave there if we could somehow be taken out of our 21st Century secular context and given the environment and life experiences of a Descartes. But it's hard to believe that at least some empathy with the suffering of other animals is not an innate characteristic of humans which exists independently of any culture and environment. So it seems likely that, as with the Nazi doctors experimenting on humans in the Holocaust, that natural empathy for the suffering of a fellow sentient being is consciously switched off by a person like Descartes or Mengele due to their mistaken idea that what they would consider to be rational argument trumps emotion; a lack of understanding of the fact that rational argument, based on empirical observation, is empty without the emotions which inspire us to make those arguments and observations.
Pure maths is an example. Without physical correlates, math can create all manner of patterns and forms that do no exist in reality. Basically it is mathematical fiction and, like fiction, sometimes they turn out to correspond with reality, but often not. Our senses and emotions ground us, limiting possibilities to those that occur in reality.
Yes, and other languages than mathematics, like English, can also be let loose from the need to correlate with anything real. ("Twas brillig and the slivey toves..."). But it's interesting how in both cases those patterns and forms seem to come from a language which
started as a map of reality but then logically extrapolated beyond the boundaries of that reality, while keeping the rules which worked for that map. Start by inventing the concept of number in order to count real world objects like apples or bricks and end up with such things as imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean spaces and fractals.
Another angle: we cannot be awed by a black hole in the same way as we might be awed by Uluru or the night sky out in the country. Yet many were awed by the first black hole image of M87*. Where did the awe come from? The photo itself, without backgrounding, was just a hollowed out, blurry and uneven orange form engulfed in darkness (not unlike the outgoing POTUS). The emotions in this instance are more "meta" - awe at the scientific achievement and, most tellingly, excitement at the novelty of seeing a black hole for the first time and having visible proof that they are real.
This brings in the subject of context. Without context,
all sensory perceptions are meaningless, not just blurry pictures of black holes (or presidents
). But I guess some sensory perceptions (such as the perception of a blurry picture of a black hole) need more explicit contextual explanation than others. For most things that we perceive in life the context is provided automatically by our previous life experiences, so it perhaps doesn't even occur to us that we needed that context.
My personal experience of standing outside on a clear night looking at the moon, stars and planets is that it is way more exhilarating than looking at a picture of those things, even though the image is almost the same. The reason why I find that is the knowledge that I'm more directly connected to those celestial objects than if I was looking at a picture or film of them. The photons of light entering my eyes when I look at Betelgeuse (for example) are the actual photons that originated inside it. But of course I only know that because somebody has told me it. Without having been told that it's just an orange point of light in the sky.
It's the proof of visceral, provable reality that excites us, no doubt an evolved trait that aids in survival. I could go on, but will leave it at so the dog can get out after yesterday's rain.
I think it's good to throw in these little snippets of everyday life every now and then to remind us that wherever we are in the world we're all also eating breakfast, walking dogs or sitting in offices. In my case, I'm currently sitting in an empty office on the last day before we close up the office for Christmas. I drove to work this morning past an airport that is currently being used as a lorry park for thousands of lorries that can't currently get across the channel from Dover to Calais because most of the rest of the world, including France, has put a temporary halt on all traffic from the UK (because of a new British-made Covid strain. Good to see our manufacturing isn't quite dead yet, even if the product doesn't seem to have much of a market.). It's quite a sight to see a long airport runway packed bumper to bumper with trucks. Especially given the context.