Most Stimulation Is Physical
Summary: Most stimulation is physical, and therefore most of our emotions actually have root in the enjoyment of physical sensations.
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This article is part of a book of my complete works, described online (with links to the articles) at http://cnx.org/content/m16323/latest/
People respond to emotions. They get a feeling or emotion, then they think about it. If a feeling is large enough to be felt consciously, then it is going to be thought about. “thinking” is really processing in a larger context, thus all emotions are processed in the mind. In this way emotions become complicated, that is, life isn’t just continuous sensory stimulation. All the sensory stimulation adds up and people have feelings about the total amount of sensory stimulation. Either that or there is a deeper feeling which people get simply from being alive, that isn’t related to sensory stimulation. This feeling must come from something, however. The world is real and it exists, this is the only source of potential feeling. Pain feels extremely real, it might be that people are happy simply because it is an avoidance of pain. It seems like pain is too large to be compared to regular sensory stimulation, like visual stimulation. This means that most emotions people have are from just their immediate environment, feeling things and touching things. Feeling their own body and the physical feelings they get from it. Vision doesn’t cause that much pleasure compared to physical. However, when someone gets happy from emotions (non physical stimulus) they get very happy. This source of happiness must come from the physical, that is, they get happy because they feel better about their physical emotions. If someone is nice to them, then they feel like they are helping them, and this means helping them stay alive, which would prolong their life and the feelings get from their body. In a similar way, all emotions are tied into the physical. What makes people happy is reward which they associate with prolonging their life. They feel deeply about prolonging their life because they get deep physical feelings from their body and from its existence. So emotions actually come from physical sensations, just not directly. That is if they were directly from physical sensations it would just be a physical sensation, but people feel deep emotions if it relates to protecting their physical sensations. In this way people are very animal-like. Seeing things and hearing things makes people feel good but this feeling is very mild. Most feeling comes just from a physical awareness of ones own body. This makes sense considering that physical pain at its height is much much worse than any emotional pain.
In review, emotional pain has its source in physical feelings and pain. This also means that emotions are really physical things. Emotions cause physical feelings. Any “feeling” is really a physical feeling, even if it is from vision or hearing. The sensory feeling triggers a deeper physical feeling because the sensory feeling reminds you that you are alive and have a physical body. In this way all sensations are tied into your physical body.
This all just really means that the physical is much more "real" than emotions are. You could say that emotions are feelings by themselves, but whenever you experience an emotion, you are also experiencing physical sensations. The physical is always there and it is strong because it is real, it is who you are. It is like a baseline for your emotions, it is a reminder that you are alive. If there was no physical world, you couldn't experience emotions because emotions are in root all physical, since everything comes from sensory stimulation initially. Thinking of it that way, all emotions are physical themselves since they remind you of seeing and touching physical things, which brings up a sense of your physical presence in that environment. Also, if the emotion isn't physical, then how is it in any way real? How can someone feel something other than physically? Can you say, "I felt that intellectualy?" How much sense does that make?
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This work is licensed by Mark Pettinelli under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0).
Last edited by Mark Pettinelli on Jun 1, 2008 10:11 am GMT-5.