Is that not how we "feel" an emotion, when it's setting off a positive or negative stimulus and the drive to remove it or increase it is what we describe as "feeling"?
You seem to have confused the noun “emotion” with the verb “feeling”; the act of feeling something with one off the five senses I have nothing against, the same goes for informative feedback such as hunger and pain. I do however have something against feeling emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, love, fear and hope
without willingly allowing it.
So to me, saying that you have direct control over your emotions is the same thing as saying you can stop feeling hunger.
Well, I could ignore it, but as I said hunger is a negative stimulus which happens to also result in the emotional longing for food. I can choose to ignore the stimulus because it is an objective internal assessment, a status report created by my body to inform me of the situation. However the emotional longing for food is a specific urge trying to force my mind into pursuing the goal, it is an active influence on my mind and this mind (i.e. myself) doesn’t appreciate the influence. I decide when to seek food because it is my objective assessment that I require food because I wish to continue functioning, not because I
feel (emotion) hungry and
want food.
e.g.
On the battlefield a hungry solider should focus on the battle at hand, only once the immediate conflict has been resolved will cooking a meal be a good idea. If the solider was thinking about food when the enemy attacks, instead of thinking about the battle like he should have been, then the effect of this will be detrimental to his survival; although once he's dead I guess he wont feel hungry any more
A bit extreme but the example highlights my point, emotions don’t recognise objective priorities, it’s all “I feel (emotional)” and “I want”… I daresay being emotional has caused many problems in the modern world, namely the prevalence of debt.
Unless, of course, they were not tied into your stimuli to begin with, i.e. you never feel anything to begin with. But then you would not be enjoying this.
You don't need to be so extreme, this is about choice, no denying oneself the ability to feel emotions.
However, I do not wish to imply that emotions are outside of our control. Using chemicals to alter your mental state (alcohol, drugs, etc) *will* produce pleasure (assuming they react with your body in a normal way), there is no way to just will it away when you are under the influence. But when you come down, you will feel worse. Physical effects like hangover and/or mental effects like feeling guilty will negatively stimulate you. So then if you've never experienced these things and/or you don't realize the repercussions, you won't be averse them. When you construct a mental simulation of the activity, you will come up and a net gain, it will be worth doing because pleasure is expected. But once you wise up and realize that there are drawbacks, you can incorporate them into your mental model and predict that the hangover tomorrow will bring more pain than you will get happiness today, leading you to avoid such situations. What does this have to do with controlling emotion? Suppose that being presented with the opportunity to go out drinking with friends made you feel good (for the reasons listed above). Then you would choose to pursue this course of action when presented with it. However, upon reflection, you decided it was a bad idea. Then you can alter your mental representation of the situation in the way described above and start feeling bad instead of good when you think about going drinking. You have then successfully changed your emotion by thinking about it.
I could just skip all this by thinking, an emotion has been triggered, do I wish to bother with it, Yes/No; more often than not the answer is yes because I value my experiences, but there are times when feeling the emotion is detrimental to me in some way and so I'll choose no.
I pose that this is the only way that humans can affect their own emotions. When in throes of jealousy, anger or any other emotion (feeling it, not just thinking about it), there is nothing we can do to directly deal with it.
Yes you can, it's just a matter of mental clarity and willpower.
Your body, Your mind, Your rules.
Your hypothetical robot, which sadly remains nameless,
I imagined a Wall-E variant, but by all means do what you want with the character.
does illustrate your point. However, I am not at all convinced that your point applies to human beings. The only way to "free your mind from the rules normally imposed upon it by its own existence" is to never have said rules imposed in the first place, psychopath style. Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with being born not able to feel emotions, no more than it's wrong to be born gay or a midget. We can take the conversation down the psychopath route if you wish. That's the only way I can address your question of "now what" at this point in time.
The human mind is a self adapting system, the evolutionary equivalent of god mode (it enables near immediate behavioural adaptation, which is like cheating when compared to the hundreds of generations required to rewrite animal instincts) and having already address your concern about being incapable of feeling emotions I can only say that you seem to underestimate the capacity of your own mind.
Please keep this up though, I've never been able to talk to anyone that would even remotely care about anything this thread touched upon so far
Ditto
edit: I'm still not finished yet!
edit 2: It just occurred to me, I'm derailing my own thread.
edit 3: Meh, whatever.
edit 4: now I'm finished… and exhausted.
