ANOTHER PANTHEISM DICUSSION

Beth Love said

I was attacked by a German Shepard, and i can tell you, I most certainly did not think everything through, I was lucky enough to have a fully functional instincual reactor...and instantly determined that there was nought to be done than kick some dog ass. I went for him, and he turned and ran, tail tucked. There's a place for intellect, an important place, but it isn't everything it thinks it is.

Reply by George Thomas

That is my point exactly. I'm a strictly materialistic, reductive determinist. WOW... lotta verbiage there, eh?

I go with the definition by evolutionary psychology that emotions evolved for the regulation of behavior or the mechanisms of behavior. My behaviors are strictly determined by the emotional signals (i.e. preference determiners) that control me. Emotions are physiological electro/chemical states in the body that range from intense to barely noticeable, but all action is preceded by a "preference" (i.e. an emotional setting in the synaptic landscape created by genetic and environmental conditions) that sets off a series of synaptic firings that reveal to the outside world what my behaviors actually look like. A spoken thought is also a behavior but my natural human duplicity makes my spoken thoughts untrustworthy or trustworthy, depending on the circumstances of the moment in which they come forth out of my mouth and body. The interesting thing is that language can be used to hide our true selves whereas our actions can't hide our "true self".

What is a true self? To my way of thinking, my true self is my biological self as expressed through its behaviors which are controlled through my electro/chemical makeup at the time of any action. Of course, experience is constantly readjusting (reevaluating) and altering that electro/chemical substrate. Also my tendency to think about or not think about my past behaviors also influence my current electro/chemical state. If I visualize a past experience and have feelings about it, that experience of having feelings about the past is readjusting my electro/chemical substrate. Thus our intellectual life reveals the process by which behavior is changed. Being reflective or un-reflective is a genetic condition, I believe, and also one of those conditions that separate the Hamlets (liberals) from the Genghis Khans (conservatives). PS: I'm revealing an emotional preference here, but I'm not feeling particularly fond of either one at the moment. I expect I respect the middle of the road average responder to the environment.

THERE AIN'T NO SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

The following is a response to a discussion I'm part of on the World Pantheism website:

I think we confuse emotions and spiritual feelings because they are both the same thing. One enters a cathedral, constructed in the medieval period to put the peasants in awe, and one has a "feeling" as one enters that space. Another person enters a rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula and entering that space a similar "feeling" of awe is created. Both situations pluck the same emotional instrument in the human nervous system which evolution has constructed to help an individual make decisions (a physical emotional process ultimately) by which to thrive and procreate. The physical world plays our emotional nervous systems like a guitarist plucks a guitar. 

I challenge people to try and describe a "spiritual" experience without eventually having to refer to the emotions or using  emotional terminology. A spiritual experience is an emotional response experienced by the physical body as it responds to the physicality of the natural world. Emotion is not experiencing anything beyond the physicality of the natural world, but when I understand myself as a feeling species responding to its environment with exactly the same sort of emotional apparatus as a tadpole in its environment or a bee in its, or beaver in its, then I'm really in awe of what the human animal has evolved into. I'm no different than a slug, just a little more complicated bit of machinery. The added fact that I can cogitate upon my reductionist architecture is the real ace in the hole.  

Beowulf is a poem where I got an image of how the monkish religious people projected their fears into the primal forests where monsters and all sorts of dangers lurked. I could see the good religious folk linking their fears onto old pagan tales that they found when they entered the Germanic territories. Another idea that taught me about how fears got religion is a comment in a history book about travel in the Dark Ages when only a handful of people would dare to travel even to the next town because of the dangers in the forest. I got this picture of these tiny isolated communities, surrounded by nearly trackless wilderness with people frozen by fear into immobility. Pedlars were the courageous explorers of that era. Extend that back to hunter gatherers who were constantly moving about in efforts to find game and "collectibles". These folk had no idea about human anatomy and the nervous system. They just had feelings about unknown versus known situations. The known was safer than the unknown, but the known might be a depleted berry patch or a fire-burned emptiness, so they had to experience that feeling of facing the unknown and go to an unknown place with fear and trepidation—that fear of the unknown they must go into was god to them, was awe to them, was a religious (i.e. spiritual) experience to them, but all they were experiencing was their emotional apparatus being triggered by their imaginative (images based on what their eyes had experienced heretofore) contemplation of the unknown. I thrill just describing the physicality of the world in which I find myself placed by an unbroken chain of successful adaptations that go back to my first single-celled ancestors. 

EMOTIONS ARE NOT INCORPOREAL, MORAL ENTITIES
BUT VERY PHYSICAL THINGS

I know that anyone who has really thought about his or her emotional life probably knows the information which follows, yet, for me, it was not that long ago that I fully realized that emotions are really nothing more than physical states in the body. The names we give to various of those body states make us believe that emotions have an existence other than their embodied existence as neurological and chemical states, but Antonio Damasio explains the situation very thoroughly in the following paragraphs from his book, The Feeling of What Happens (pp.50-52). Once one begins to think of emotions as purely chemical or neurological states, he can begin to rethink so much he has been taught about the “morality” of emotional states. Emotions are neither wrong nor right, sinful or wholesome; emotions just ARE.

[SNIP]
The mention of the word emotion usually calls to mind one of the six so-called primary or universal emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust. Thinking about the primary emotions makes the discussion of the problem easier, but it is important to note that there are numerous other behaviors to which the label "emotion" has been attached. They include so-called secondary or social emotions, such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, or pride; and what I call background emotions, such as well-being or malaise, calm or tension. The label emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to the states of pain and pleasure.

A shared biological core underlies all these phenomena, and it can be outlined as follows:

1. Emotions are complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern; all emotions have some kind of regulatory role to play, leading in one way or another to the creation of circumstances advantageous to the organism exhibiting the phenomenon; emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life.

2. Notwithstanding the reality that learning and culture alter the expression of emotions and give emotions new meanings, emotions are biologically determined processes, depending on innately set brain devices, laid down by a long evolutionary history.

3. The devices which produce emotions occupy a fairly restricted ensemble of subcortical regions, beginning at the level of the brain stem and moving up to the higher brain; the devices are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states, which will be discussed in chapter 5.

4. All the devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation; the considerable amount of individual variation and the fact that culture plays a role in shaping some inducers do not deny the fundamental stereotypicity, automaticity, and regulatory purpose of the emotions.

5. All emotions use the body as their theater (internal milieu, visceral, vestibular and musculoskeletal systems), but emotions also affect the mode of operation of numerous brain circuits: the variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.
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