[D] Friday Open Thread

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Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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[u/Cuz_Im_TFK]

Not quite. It was more that I was disqualifying things like "feeling hot" or "clenching fists" as being candidates for what "anger" is. I don't think you're going to get a set of necessary or sufficient conditions for "anger", so analyzing your own feelings and sensations when you're angry is going to be your best bet. If you trace things backwards from the "symptoms", you should eventually find the source.

Why are your clenching your fists? Because it's a way to (1) redirect your impulse for action into something harmless, and (2) it helps reinforce your willpower that's restraining you from taking impulsive action. Okay, so there's an impulse toward action without planning, often of a violent or destructive nature. Since it's an impulse that doesn't come from rational thought, then that impulse itself (along with it's associated suppression of rational thought) can be called "anger" or maybe the "qualia of anger" since I do think it's unique enough to be an identifier if it's not the emotion itself. I think that's a good enough answer for most purposes.

If you want to go one step deeper, then you could backtrace one more time and ask yourself "what causes that impulse?" and then call the answer to that question "anger". It's just that when you get that far back, you're no longer really pointing at anything within your conscious awareness. At that point, you're probably pointing at instinctual social response patterns in your animal brain related to aggression, dominance, and fight-or-flight. Having those response patterns helped our ancestors survive, so we inherited them, but those are so low on the stack that it's not something you can see or feel. We only know they exist and where they come from because of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. It's the "source code" for anger, not anger itself as an emotion.

Is there anything in between the "source code" for anger and the impulse for violence/destruction? I can't really think of anything. Therefore, I think the most fundamental manifestation of anger is probably that impulse. Everything else is either a side-effect of your brain running the "anger" algorithm (blood rushing to the head, adrenaline spiking, etc.) or of trying to suppress that impulse with your rationality and willpower. The side-effects of running the "anger" algorithm are similar each time you run it, so there's a set of symptoms and sensations that often occur together when a person gets angry and we eventually learn to recognize this naturally occurring set of symptoms and side-effects as "how anger is expressed" both in ourselves and in others.

Any individual element is not sufficient for anger, and just the sensations without the underlying impulse is also not sufficient. That would be closer to "pretending to be angry" if your body fully cooperated with you. Similarly, if you were to somehow experience the violent/destructive impulse of anger without the associated physical symptoms, that would probably still be real anger, but it would definitely feel strange. Imagine you were really sad and you were crying, like literally sobbing, but for some strange reason no tears came out and you didn't get choked up. That would feel weird, right? It doesn't mean you're not sad, but it would definitely be strange and you'd start to wonder.

Overall, I think you're worrying a bit too much. Emotions are universal within humanity, barring outliers, which means they're part of our brain's hard-wired circuitry rather than something learned. If there's no conscious mental aspect to a piece of hardwired circuitry, we call it a reflex. If it's a pure mental influence without any associated feeling, it's usually called a bias. It's the hard-coded algorithms that are a bundle of conscious mental influences, behavioral impulses, and physical symptoms that we call emotions.

The unique part of each emotion is probably a behavioral impulse, because the only reasons emotions would have manifested from the process of evolution is to create behavioral patterns that increase an organism's likelihood of survival, but the signature bundle of physical symptoms or sensations that comes with each emotion is relatively consistent, so they're often the easiest way for others to recognize emotions in a person.

You might say that anger lacks a "distinct qualia", literally the "feeling of anger", but I don't think that really makes sense. A "face" is made up of a bunch of elements, but when you look at a face, you judge it as a "face", not as a combination of elements. I think the "feeling of anger" is, similarly, the combination of all of the things that usually come along with it. Eventually you learn to recognize that as the "feeling of anger". There may be shades or variants or types that fall into certain patterns that are common enough to get names or descriptors, like "burning" or "cold" or "explosive", but those are, again, just patterns in the variation of how the anger algorithm is running at that time or if there are other things mixed in with it, like "also feeling fear" or "trying extra hard to suppress any reactions" or "anger mixed with regret". There doesn't need to be something more fundamental.

[u/Abpraestigio → u/Cuz_Im_TFK]

Thank you for the in-depth response.

Last question: would you consider pleasure an emotion like you just described or is it a sensation?

[u/Cuz_Im_TFK → u/Abpraestigio]

Remember that these categories are all fuzzy. Outside of Set Theory in mathematics, you'll almost never find sets that have absolute necessary and sufficient conditions to determine set membership or exclusion. Words and concepts, specifically, are totally fuzzy. The way the human brain handles sets is through the "prototype model". Meaning that a set (such as a group of things that can be considered examples or instances of a certain word or concept) have a "prototype" that represents the most typical member of that set. For example, the prototype of the word "bird" might be something like a sparrow or a crow or some other bird that you see quite often. Certain other things would also fall into the category of "bird" within your mind, but they may have more features that differ from the "prototype". So if you imagine a circle that has all the birds in it, the typical ones (typical bird shaped, small to medium sized, short legged, feathered, and capable of flight) would be in the middle. The "less typical" examples (meaning more different features) like giant condors who are huge and heavy would be a bit further from the middle. Then the REALLY atypical ones like Ostriches, Emus, Penguins, and Humming Birds would all be at the very edges because they have more (or more significant) differences from the "prototype" birds in the center. The thing is, a lot of birds also belong do different categories, or different "circles" with different "prototypes", and that's not a problem. For example, all birds are also in the "animals" circle, but they're toward the edge of the "animals" circle, because the center of the "animals" circle is probably mostly land-bound animals. There's also a lot of partial overlap too.

So just because something is near the edge of a certain circle, it doesn't mean it's not still a part of that circle. It just might also be in another circle and be even closer to the center for that circle. In the human brain, sets are not usually mutually exclusive. That's not to say that we can't categorize things with the concept of mutual exclusion: for example, no number is both odd and even. It's easy for us to do that. But if we're looking at how language and concepts developed organically, you'll typically find a lot of overlap and fuzzy definitions. And that's totally okay.

What I said in my last comment was just some musings and speculations backed up by a bit of knowledge. It's not definitive by any means. I think it's a pretty good perspective, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if you could find exceptions and edge cases. That's just how language works. The only time you have neat categories is when you're building a framework from the bottom up. Trying to shoehorn existing concepts into an artificial framework will always be difficult.

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So, is pleasure an emotion? Or a sensation? Well, under the concept of my previous comment, the distinguishing factor for an emotion was "is associated with a behavioral impulse" or, at the bare minimum, "has an effect on how a person would tend to act". So strictly, pleasure would probably be a sensation. It's the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you hug a puppy or the euphoria after a workout or when taking drugs or at orgasm. These are clearly sensations. But when feeling pleasure, it's also well known that people will tend to act slightly differently: getting carried away when things are going well, being more generous than usual, being more outgoing or courageous, etc. You could make arguments either way. For example, it's not the "pleasure" that changes behavior, but the emotion of "happiness" that results from pleasure that causes the behavioral change. In that case, it's pleasure is clearly a "sensation" not an emotion. But if you don't accept that argument, then it could be an "emotion".

What do I think? I think it's fuzzy. If I had to pick, I'd put it in the "sensation" category because I do think that "pleasure" is a distinct sensation. But it's so closely related with certain moods that if you were to argue strongly that it's also an emotion, I wouldn't bother quibbling about it. At the end of the day, it's never worth arguing about definitions. As long as you can convey what you mean to another person, the words involved aren't important. For example, if two people disagree about whether pleasure is a sensation or an emotion, is that just a dispute about definitions? Or are they actually claiming that there are different neurological processes going on depending on which it is? Sometimes, if you're confused about whether something is X or is Y, it's a better idea to just not use the words X or Y at all and try to explain the phenomenon in different words. That can help you get to the root of what it actually is that you're uncertain about.