Is good an actual quality like water that we need to drink?

[The Transcended Omniverse]

Psychologists often divide emotions into two categories: intrinsically positive and intrinsically negative (i.e. feeling good and feeling bad). I have every reason to think this division is true based upon my own personal experience. After all, positive and negative, good and bad, light and darkness is a well known concept in many movies, anime, artwork, etc. Feeling good and feeling bad is an actual quality of good and bad.

This means that good and bad are actual qualities like water, food, electricity, etc. That is, they are actual things rather than ideas or concepts. If you are someone who struggled with depression or negative emotions such as feelings of anger, disgust, or sadness where you had little to no positive emotions in your life, then you would be having little to no good value in your life just as how you would be having little to no water.

The thought and belief of having water in your life will not give you actual water just as how believing that your life is still good, joyful, beautiful, and worth living during your miserable moments or other negative emotional states would not bring your life any of those things either. Sadly, this means that all those famous and genius miserable artists and composers had little to no good value in their lives regardless of what they believed otherwise. Their lives and artistic endeavors were virtually meaningless and empty even though they were deluded otherwise.

So, with all of this being said, positive and negative emotions, also known as pleasant and unpleasant emotions, are intrinsically good and bad. Beliefs and mindsets themselves are not the same thing as emotions because, if you were in the most miserable state of your life and you believed that you were in a positive emotional state such as feeling joyful and excited about a certain idea such as going to the carnival, then you wouldn't be.

It would just be the thought of being excited and joyful, but no real excitement and joy. Our positive and negative emotions would be like our own inner light and inner darkness. It is the inner light we need to truly make our lives and artistic endeavors good and beautiful and it is the darkness we should avoid since that can only make our lives bad and shit. This means that the only way to live and be an artist is through positive emotions.

To conclude this packet, I will point out something interesting here. Emotions themselves are actual value judgments. Here is a response from a skeptic/neuroscientist which supports this:

Emotions are value judgments too. If they weren't, humanity would not be distinct from other mammals; we would be biological machines with no autonomy, acting purely on instinct. For example, if you are physically hurt, and the doctor treating you causes you pain during treatment, do you become angry and bite him? No, because you are able to override your instinctive anger and fear at someone causing you pain with your ability to reason that the treatment is necessary and the pain is temporary. But a dog can't reason, and will bite to stop the person causing the pain. Both the instinctive emotions AND the reasoned thoughts are value judgments.

Therefore, since our positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and our negative emotions always being emotional value judgments of bad value, since emotions themselves are actual qualities (things that exist such as water, food, electricity, etc.), then positive emotions would have to be a quality of good and negative emotions would have to be a quality of bad.

This means that the only way to live the most beautiful, good, and worthwhile life would be if you were in the most profound, intense state of euphoria of your life and the only worst life you can live would be if you were in the most profoundly horrible negative emotional state of your life. Unfortunately, moments of euphoria are very brief and fleeting which means that your life can only be the greatest for you in brief, fleeting moments.

Other Person's Response: Could you give me an example of people who think that their positive emotions are the inner light to their lives as you claim?

My Reply: There are many people out there who struggle with depression. Many hate their lives and they just want to die. They say that having a positive mindset does nothing for them. This supports my worldview quite well because these depressed people are only expressing the truth here. They are merely expressing the need for the inner light back into their lives again. Many people out there don't realize this truth. Depressed people simply come to the aid of therapists, counselors, and mental health professionals who help change their thinking and work on certain therapeutic methods when, in reality, none of these things were the issue.

What really needs to be done for these depressed folks is to somehow find a way to restore their positive emotions. I realize that antidepressants are one method. But something more needs to be done here since our positive emotions are truly the only things we have to make our lives good and worth living for. I don't care if anything I say offends or upsets you. The truth is the truth and it needs to be shared. I, myself, have struggled 10 whole years with the worst misery of my life induced by emotional traumas and obsessive thinking and it is time I shared the truth of my personal experience to the world.

[William]

[Replying to post 40 by Complexity]

Some people are suicidal and depressed, not because of a chemical imbalance or a life tragedy, but because of fully embracing a Darwinian deterministic animalistic philosophy. I experienced that 1969-1970. I obviously hung on to a sliver of hope of finding a goodness that is beyond the theory of man being a doomed hairless ape, fooling himself about his importance.

That reminded me of this;

YouTube Video [3:17]Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky on stress reduction of religiosity.

"Rates of depression are much higher among atheists - go figure."

[bluethread]

[Replying to post 34 by bluethread]

By this, are you implying that emotions feel different for different people just as how a heard noise would be heard differently? The thoughts themselves would still not be any state of hearing sound and neither would they be any emotional state. But the heard noise would still be different for different people just as how emotions would feel different for different people.

Well, I would think that would depend on what one is referring to when uses the terms emotions and feel. It is possible to track nerve signals, and measure the responses. What is interesting is that those responses are not always the same from person to person. This seems to be chalked up to sensitivity, but I know of nothing that records exactly how one's consciousness perceives those signals. Pavlov suggests that one's responses to a given stimuli can be changed. Therefore, even that is not consistent. How much more perceptions that can only be communicated, but not shared.

Romantics speak of "shared feelings". However, I think that is just one's reactions to another's actions. In other words, there is no reason to believe that two people who are "sharing a moment" are perceiving it the same way. They can just be both communicating mutual satisfaction, positive or negative. Charismatic people are good at eliciting such responses from others, but such individuals commonly turn out to be con artists, or claim to have been deceived themselves. So, at the moment, how does one distinguish between empathy and pandering. I would think it is all in the consciousness of the individual and is subject to changing interpretation over time.

I just noticed that I had already responded to that post. I am glad that I did not embarrass myself by saying something different. As it is, they both say the same thing in different ways.