Originally Posted by
Guisslapp
What I am saying is that emotions are kind of like trained reflexes. They are conceptual shortcuts. Your body has the ability to trigger these "feelings" so you don't screw up. I would bet that evolution helped "select for" these abilities. The feelings are a natural part of our biology. The conceptual shortcuts are typically learned. Fundamentally emotions are "triggered" by concepts (that is - the senses don't trigger them directly, but some level of cognition is required to provoke the feeling). Here is more explanation from the epistemology thread:
A feeling or emotion is a response to an object one perceives (or imagines) such as a man, an animal, an event. The object by itself, however, has no power to invoke a feeling in the observer.
Emotions are distinct from sensations because a sensation is an experience transmitted by purely physical means – it is independent of a person’s ideas. By contrast love, desire, fear, anger, joy are not simply products of physical stimuli. They depend on the content of the mind.
Once a man has acquired a vocabulary of conceptual knowledge, he automatizes it, just as one automatizes the knowledge of spelling or any complex skill. Similarly, once a man has formed a series of value-judgments, he automatizes them. He does not need a process of appraisal in order to decide that he values a high grade on a test. One’s value-judgments, like one’s past knowledge, are present in the subconscious – meaning by this term a store of the mental contents one has acquired by conscious means, but which are not in conscious awareness at a given time. Under the appropriate conditions the mind applies such contents to a new object automatically and instantaneously, without the need of further conscious consideration. To many people, as a result, it seems as if men perceive and then feel, with no intervening factor. The truth is that a chain of ideas and value-judgments intervenes.
Interesting story Peikoff tells:...When, as a college teacher, I would reach the topic of emotions in class, my standard procedure was to open the desk, take out a stack of examination booklets, and, without any explanations, start distributing them. Consternation invariably broke loose, with cries such as "You never said we were having a test today!" and "It isn't fair!" Whereupon I would take back the booklets and ask: "How many can explain the emotion that just swept over you? Is it an inexplicable primary, a quirk of your glands, a message from God or the id?" The answer was obvious. The booklets, to most of them, meant failure on an exam, a lower grade in the course, a blot on their transcript, i.e., bad news. On this one example, even the dullest students grasped with alacrity that emotions do have causes and that their causes are the things men think. (The auditors in the room, who do not write exams, remained calm during this experiment. To them, the surprise involved no negative value-judgment.)...
An emotion derives from a percept assessed within a context; the context is defined by a highly complex conceptual content. Most of this content at any time is not present in the conscious awareness. But it is real and operative nonetheless. What makes emotions incomprehensible to many people is the fact that their ideas are not only largely subconscious, but also inconsistent. Men have the ability to accept contradictions without knowing it. This leads to the appearance of CONFLICT between thought and feelings.
Emotions are not inexplicable demons, though they become that if a man holds contradictions and does not identify his ideas explicitly. Even then, the cause of emotions remains the same. Strictly speaking, a “clash between thought and feeling” is a misnomer – every such clash is at root and ideational clash.
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