Complex Numbers

Emotion Notion

Some of my entries this month, including this one, will be based on prompts from "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. As usual, I'm picking them at random.

The prompts for that activity are all quotes this round. My goal is to do these entries without looking up the source of the quote until after I'm done, because these are meant to be "blind quotes." We'll see if I can avoid the temptation, because sometimes I want context.

And thus, the first entry for JI:

"And it hit me, that to me, those are two of my deepest-felt emotions. Justice, equality, fairness, mercy, longsuffering, Work, Passion, knowledge, and above all else, Truth. Those are my primary emotions."

Fortunately, math isn't an emotion. I count nine there, not two.

I realize most people don't consider those things to be emotions. I have it on good authority, though, that some people indeed feel them as emotions, which seems a bit odd to me, but then, most things involving emotion do. So I simply accept that yes, for some people those are emotions.

Which is something I think more people might try to understand: that other people feel emotions differently than they do. It's not exactly empathy, because I'm not asking anyone to feel what they feel, but just to accept that they do feel it.

Maybe it's a bit like being blind. As I was losing my eyesight last year, I naturally started to think about what it might be like to be blind in a society that's so visually-oriented. So you're blind, and someone's describing something to you visually... you can't see it directly, but you can accept that they see what they see, right? And in a sense (pun intended, as always), we're all blind when it comes to others' emotions. We can sometimes read it in their faces or their body language, a certain stress in their voice, but to get a better idea of what they're feeling, they have to tell us.

Many's the time I've been stressed, and people ask me "what are you angry about?" Well, I wasn't angry until you misread my emotional state; I guess I'm just one of those people who project anger when stressed. It doesn't help that I don't really smile; I physically can't show my teeth when I'm grinning, the way other people do. (At least this helps when I play poker, and when I face apex predators in the forest.) (Just kidding; I don't do forests.)

Worse, though, is when I'm depressed. I mean, I guess depression is an emotion, as it's a mental state associated with certain internal feelings Although again, different people process it differently -- some cry, some can't get out of bed, some experience anhedonia (which is something I've never had; even when I'm depressed, I enjoy certain things, such as beer). What I'm getting at, though, is if I bother to tell someone I'm depressed, I get, "What are you depressed about?" Grr. Now I'm annoyed AND depressed, because it's not about anything; it's a brain chemical neuroreceptor thing or whatever. Worst still is when I get, "Are you thinking about suicide?" No, but now I'm thinking about homicide. (Not seriously, though.)

Just to be clear, the only times I've ever "thought about" suicide, it's been in the context of fiction writing, much as the writer of a murder mystery "thinks about" murder.

The point, insofar as there is one, is that the only thing we can really rely on when it comes to assessing someone else's emotional state is a) what they tell us and b) if they're being honest about it. And I tend to default to "yes" for part (b) there unless I have some reason to think they're lying.

Consequently, if someone tells you that the emotion they're feeling right now is one of those nine, fucking believe them.

Now, I don't feel any of those things as emotions. Well, I guess "passion" is the exception there (or used to be, back when I had shits to give), but the other eight are what are, for me, abstract principles or, as in the case of "work," activities.

Most of them are things I strive for. There's no external source of justice, so I try to be just and I feel satisfaction when someone acts justly. Similarly, there's no fairness, so it's up to me to act as fairly as I can, which also makes me feel good. And so on. The exception for me is work, to which I'm strongly allergic. But regardless, most of these ideas can create emotion in me -- anger when I see injustice or inequality, for example, or happiness when I find some new knowledge or achieve some epiphany of truth -- but I don't feel them directly as emotions. Again, though, I accept that others do.

Maybe it's sort of like synesthesia, you know, the people who can hear colors or smell numbers. Just different neuronal firing in their brains.

As an aside, I have to wonder why some of those qualities are capitalized, and others aren't. This might be a matter of context, and like I said, I'm just going by the provided quote, rather than trying to find the source.

Anyway, I feel that to be... you know... fair, I should present a contrary view, so here it is.  

New research based on brain scans shows that people who care about justice are swayed more by reason than by emotion.

All I can say to rebut that, not being an expert in the field, is that it may be true for the majority, but for something like this, we also have to consider individual differences and outliers. What I mean is, I don't think we should be reading an article like that and assuming that it applies to everyone. It's like... if someone did a study about coffee, and the study showed that people like coffee (not an unreasonable result). So you think, "everyone likes coffee!" Well, perhaps most people do, but it doesn't change the fact that I despise the stuff.

With that, I've banged on long enough. And I managed not to look up the quote, so... yay me?