Why we feel : The sciece of human emotions.
The feeling of immediate pain and schooling.
Our physical world has no “idea” of / does not comprise light, sounds, smells or tastes, but contains matter, chemicals dissolved in air or water, rays, electromagnetic radiation, … which are received by one’s sensory organs and nerves and translated by specific parts of his brain into experiences – sense of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. One’s body makes him experience certain physical sensations, such as a feeling of hunger, tiredness, etc. Then, these types of senses and feelings are used by our neurons as guides to one’s experiences acquired through his interaction with his immediate natural and social environment, forming “real” and abstract thoughts, ideas and images. Thus we speak of : the sense of direction / locality / proportion / well-being / fulfilment / uplift / values / a word / the absurd…, and a feeling of expectancy / danger…
Our neurons create all that we sense, all of our sensual abilities – our ability to feel any emotion – is the end product of an emergent property from the neural processes in our brain, i.e., feelings develop as emergent properties of the neural processes of the brain. At least for a few minutes, one can have awareness of sensations without a single thought in his head, and thus we may dare to wonder whether the foundation of consciousness lie in feelings rather than thought.
The abstractness of “a sense of” and “a feeling of” are the staff that give meaning to the thinking part of our brain – I would rather live as a blithering feeling idiot rather than a thinking computer (i.e. neurons with no recordings of feelings), and this, because no sage can explain my internal conscious experiences using a computational theory of mind.
Prometheas’ torturous gift to us is our awareness of the mortality of man, and for this I say that it’s fair, if we were given the choice, to opt for a supernatural eternal life. But since this alternative is one that may materialize in the very distant future, I recommend that we should exploit a wise, evolved defence mechanism of our brain to deal with the imperfections of our biological body, and
with some threats to our being of the physical environment – the practicality of the feeling of immediate pain.
Most of our feelings act like discriminate hedonic amplifiers, which define and exaggerate the reproductive consequences of the environmental or social events. The immediate (feeling of) pain is an evolved conscious experience that exaggerates the biological threat so that we may learn to avoid dangerous situations / harmful substances, etc.
The ones who understand the importance of preventive medicine to our well being will be able to grasp the benefits to our children of the application of the following proposition : we amplify, through the teaching of sciences to our students, the importance of dealing with a problem (smoking, propaganda, belief in the paralogue, … ) at its root so that it may not become an insolvable biological or psychological problem (cancer, fear of demons, …)
If we sincerely want to protect our selves from our selves, we must become keen students of the workings of nature.
Σπύρος Ε. Κουλουμπέρης
27440-26458
694-1569303
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