Does this logic hold up? Am I being an idiot?

[Terran]

I experience emotion, my emotions are objectively illogical and meaningless. I am a part of the universe, my synaptic system is a part of the system of the universe. Emotions are therefore a part of the universe. So emotions are therefore no more invalid than laws of physics?

...or at least...laws of chemistry?

 

[Terran]

Does this invalidate the logic of physics, or validate the logic of emotion?

 

[Seteleechete]

Emotions are rarely illogical, your mind is set up to react to certain situations in certain ways which comes in the response of emotions(and these responses can be analysed so it can be shown by which responses something happened).

That said it doesn't mean you need to listen to your emotions, after all the "emotional" part of your brain might disagree with the "logical" part of it and I personally usually put more weight on the logical part. I say usually because I recognize that certain values/beliefs I have supercedes logical conclusions but because of the strong emotional responses and associations I still allow them certain privileges in my thought process and actions.

And frankly emotionally based answers are needed when questions can't be answered or directions chosen with just logic.

 

[Nebulous]

It's a fact that humans experience emotion.
You can't always pinpoint the reason.
I believe that there is a scientific explanation, but we don't currently have the technology needed to figure it out.

 

[Hadoblado]

You're splitting your perception.

I experience emotion, my emotions are objectively illogical and meaningless. I am a part of the universe, my synaptic system is a part of the system of the universe. Emotions are therefore a part of the universe.

Here you're talking about them from the perspective of the universe. Even when you say 'I' you're talking about yourself as a part of the universe's perception (that it obviously doesn't have).

So emotions are therefore no more invalid than laws of physics?

...or at least...laws of chemistry?

But when you ask about validity, that's a personal thing. The universe neither knows logic nor cares for it. Logic is a system for ruling out possibilities. It's a trait only useful to the inquiring mind (or the mindless machine I guess). Your emotions exist in the universe, but that does not mean you should see them as the anthropomorphic puppet universe you've concocted sees it.

Emotions dictate what you want, logic is the means of attaining it. Emotions are alogical, and that sort of means that branding them as illogical is the answer to the wrong question. Emotions can seem illogical when you act on them instead of logic, but that's not actually what's happening. What's happening is that you have multiple emotions that are not in accord, and those that your actions work at the behest of are not necessarily the ones the promote what is best for your identity, beliefs, or other emotions. The logic worked fine, it can't help if its master was a dick who told it that it needed to cheat on their spouse, or marry a loser, or punch someone in the face.

Thus becoming more logical is more about attuning your emotions to work in unison. Also developing the skill, but that's another story.

But yes, the universe doesn't care, so you acting emotionally is the same as acting logically to it. It's all just cause and effect to omniscience.

 

[Intolerable]

What Hadoblado said but with one more important point.

Neither your crying nor the destruction of the Earth would mean anything to the cosmos. We're not even as important as a flea on a dog for the simple fact the dog knows the flea exists.

If you find it too difficult to accept this you could always deny it.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

More valid in reference to what?

Validity is a term describing a relation, you haven't defined it

 

[Urakro]

It's not that these less-than-contained feelings span a section in physical space, but they are swept across a part in the temporal. As anyone, your life became your narration since before you can remember when you started building a cohesion to your experiences. Your emotions being the counter-weight to the conflicts in that story.

With emotions, imagination, and your instinct, conflict plays the most important part. Not to be heavily thought of as anything bad in it's essence, a conflict is variably anything you experienced that drastically changed your understanding and polarized your attitudinal reasoning from the source. This will be something that really tripped you out. The more polarization that happened in that event, and the more it's reinforced with aversion, the bigger and deeper the emotion. It can carry a lot of charge, repelling away from it's event, and leading you away from being able to reason with it.

If it happens that you rencounter an imitated impression, or in most similarity, the event itself, the detached observation of your reaction could be easily confused as something brought together on a cosmic scale. Though really, you've just encountered the key to your programming, the reasoning of your narrative, and much of the meaning you've attributed to your life.

And so that's me being an idiot. I'm also well aware that a lot of that logic doesn't hold up (if you can even call it logic). But it was a fun random thought.

 

[QuickTwist]

Emotions are instinctual and logic is forethought. They both exist in people and to greater distinctions. For some, instincts give rise to forethought and for others vise versa.

 

[NewInternet]

Here you're talking about them from the perspective of the universe. Even when you say 'I' you're talking about yourself as a part of the universe's perception (that it obviously doesn't have).

If he is part of the universe than he is the universe's method of perception and therefore the universe indeed perceives.

 

[Terran]

If he is part of the universe than he is the universe's method of perception and therefore the universe indeed perceives.

Yes, that is what I meant, I probably phrased it wrong though. I am not saying the EXISTENCE of emotion is illogical, only that surely due to the fact that the 'sentience' that experiences them are a part of the universe, their perceived 'meaning' becomes objective. I.E: Is believing something is something else actually objectively correct to an extent, as long as you believe it?

But then again, I think the problem with the logic ultimately comes down to the idea of sentience, just because a system is complex enough to think like we do, doesn't mean it has thoughts in anyway coherent or relevant outside of itself. We have scientific theory to try to make our thoughts consistent with our observations of our observed universe, but what is the observed universe other than what our senses tell us? How can we rely on that? What we perceive and reason from is just our universe, we could be completely ignorant to a vast array of truth which we can simply never be able to 'reason' our way to.

 

[Terran]

What Hadoblado said but with one more important point.

Neither your crying nor the destruction of the Earth would mean anything to the cosmos. We're not even as important as a flea on a dog for the simple fact the dog knows the flea exists.

If you find it too difficult to accept this you could always deny it.

Exactly my point, the idea of 'nothing meaning anything to the cosmos' is surely invalid when WE are a part of the cosmos, and we care!

Obviously it is a far stretch of logic, but I think it is certainly an interesting idea.

 

[EditorOne]

Emotions are real, but INTPs seem to find them somewhat less than useful, convenient or fun.

That's all.

 

[NewInternet]

Is believing something is something else actually objectively correct to an extent, as long as you believe it?

But then again, I think the problem with the logic ultimately comes down to the idea of sentience, just because a system is complex enough to think like we do, doesn't mean it has thoughts in anyway coherent or relevant outside of itself. We have scientific theory to try to make our thoughts consistent with our observations of our observed universe, but what is the observed universe other than what our senses tell us? How can we rely on that? What we perceive and reason from is just our universe, we could be completely ignorant to a vast array of truth which we can simply never be able to 'reason' our way to.

Lines of thought such as this probably created the doubt which created a lot of geocentric models of the universe, and gods that watched humans piss and cared if they jerked off. There is a thought experiment I play around with to think about the accuracy of human interpretations of reality:

Imagine we discovered a new layer of reality that was completely incomprehensible and thus completely impossible to understand in any known language. Even more obscure than quantum physics or anything at can be put into any type of math. So, we build a computer that translates this layer of reality into anything appreciable through one or more of the five senses and subsequently the mind.

The problem is, we have no proof that this computer is doing anything but generating nonsense as per the parameters supplied to the computer. Do patterns within it mean anything? If we can only view this obscure layer of reality through this computer than we can also only manipulate through it. Can we be sure that we are actually manipulating a distant reality and not just the computer that is allowing us to perceive it?

To me, this is pretty analogous to what our brains do.

 

[doncarlzone]

I experience emotion, my emotions are objectively illogical and meaningless. I am a part of the universe, my synaptic system is a part of the system of the universe. Emotions are therefore a part of the universe. So emotions are therefore no more invalid than laws of physics?

...or at least...laws of chemistry?

You asked about your logic.

I take it that you're saying in simple terms that since you are a part of the world, and the world is physical, then your emotions, which are a part of you, too are physical. That seems about right logically - and it's quite sound too.

Now from this you conclude
(1): Your emotions are objectively illogical
(2): Your emotions are no more invalid than laws of physics.

As far as the logical analysis goes, I will leave it here. You could attempt to make the argument valid by the use of further premises such as the whole universe is objectively invalid, but I'm not even going to go down that road.

Essentially, what you are getting at is that your emotions can't be "valid" if they are a part of the physical universe. In other words, because your emotions are physical and thus part of the universe's laws of physics, your emotions are invalid.

Well from that you may ask youself: If your emotions were not a part of the physical universe, would your emotions then be valid / or objectively logical?

Now if your answer is 'No' to this question, I wonder why you would mention this at all (that your emotions are a part of the physical world). If I were to say that I rejected a piece of chocolate because it had nuts in it, and yet still rejected the piece of chocolate without the nuts; one should wonder why I bothered mentioning the nuts in the first place.

If your answer is 'Yes' to this question, then I invite you to explain a realm in which your emotions are not physical, and in addition to that; how that realm suddenly would make your emotions valid / or "objectively logical".

 

[Hadoblado]

If he is part of the universe than he is the universe's method of perception and therefore the universe indeed perceives.

That it doesn't have in a sense greater than your own perception. It doesn't make any difference if your perception is technically that of the universe. Truth is not the universe's opinion. A clumsy turn of phrase, my apologies.

 

[NewInternet]

That it doesn't have in a sense greater than your own perception. It doesn't make any difference if your perception is technically that of the universe. Truth is not the universe's opinion. A clumsy turn of phrase, my apologies.

I think I understand what you're saying. Just to be sure, could you possibly rephrase?

 

[Hadoblado]

Okay.

OP claims their emotions are part of deterministic law, just like physics, and are therefore of equal 'validity' to physics. The objective nature of physics as deterministic laws of the universe is then conflated with their perception of them. Just because physics bare some superficial similarity to emotion in your perceptions as literally 'things that exist in the universe' does not make it a 'valid' comparison.

So ummm... Yes emotions are causally determined, yes at the hand of physics. But that's a different equation completely to whether or not your emotions are meaningful. Physics dictate what emotions you experience, but not the 'validity' of those emotions as meaningful aids to perception.

The OP is a useful counterpoint to arguments such as 'emotions can be wrong, therefore we should ignore their existence'. But if it's 'my emotions are as physical laws, I am justified in my affective regression' it doesn't cut it.

I'm not sure if that's clear. Sobriety is but the whisper of a distant land I'm afraid.

 

[QuickTwist]

"Modern conflict theory[edit]
Modern conflict theory, a variation of ego psychology, is a revised version of structural theory, most notably different by altering concepts related to where repressed thoughts were stored(Freud, 1923, 1926). Modern conflict theory centers around how emotional symptoms and character traits are complex solutions to mental conflict.[40] It dispenses with the concepts of a fixed id, ego and superego, and instead posits conscious and unconscious conflict among wishes (dependent, controlling, sexual, and aggressive), guilt and shame, emotions (especially anxiety and depressive affect), and defensive operations that shut off from consciousness some aspect of the others. Moreover, healthy functioning (adaptive) is also determined, to a great extent, by resolutions of conflict.

A major objective of modern conflict-theory psychoanalysis is to change the balance of conflict in a patient by making aspects of the less adaptive solutions (also called "compromise formations") conscious so that they can be rethought, and more adaptive solutions found. Current theoreticians following Brenner's many suggestions (see especially Brenner's 1982 book, The Mind in Conflict) include Sandor Abend, MD (Abend, Porder, & Willick, (1983), Borderline Patients: Clinical Perspectives), Jacob Arlow (Arlow and Brenner (1964), Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory), and Jerome Blackman (2003), 101 Defenses: How the Mind Shields Itself."

From Wiki on Psychoanalysis.