Well, yeah, being alone puts you at higher risk of schizophrenia and dementia, experiencing and expressing negative emotions makes you stressed and tired, we're social animals.
Kind of interesting how as a society we seem to be rejecting it - a lot of technology enables us to be alone or at least not in direct contact with others.
I wonder what the ramifications of that will be in the future.
> …a lot of technology enables us to be alone or at least not in direct contact with others.
What I've seen during the pandemic is that technology enables my family to be in direct contact (if not physically) with others for most of our waking time. Certainly, my kids spend more time with their friends virtually than I did with mine physically as a child.
Does the physical part matter? The article references a study where altruistic behavior (a donation) has benefits even if that behavior isn't done in person.
Reality is constructed of information states if we really want to be honest with ourselves. There is never really a _true_ information state. Charles Sanders Peirce called the world we build a 'phaneron,' the information state as presented by the senses. Everyone's eyes are a blurry figment of what the true photonic field is. Same with touch when it comes to surfaces and well, all the senses. And those senses degrade over time as we age.
I hate hearing the phrase 'real world' or 'physical' being used to describe non-electronic interaction. Call the in-person stuff analog if you'd like. But the digital stuff is just as real. We never have the entire quantum state of other people accessible. We always just get a small blurry sample of their true presence. Does it matter whether it goes through air or down a copper wire?
The only difference is with regard to security. I can see that argument as valid. But unless security/imposters are a concern, it's still the real deal.
LOL basically you have to accept that our current scientific understanding is that our minds are embodied constructs (your mind doesn’t exist in any meaningful way without your brain, which is a physical organ and fundamentally and essentially integrated with the body).
Thought itself is embodied.
Your argument proves the necessity of physical contact for human health.
Our biologies - our brains and bodies - require the information (chemical impulses, electrical impulses, etc) provided by our senses when embodied physical touch, sight, sound, the body heat of another person, etc, occur.
Unless a perfect simulacra of physical human interaction (including the ability for us to move our own physical bodies) was created, there will always be a lack of the information (consider the chemicals released by exercise, by a hug, and impact of said chemicals on the brain, the combination of chemicals from eating with the chemicals of being close to someone you like) which our embodied minds require for health.
You’d have to put a brain in a vat and feed it every single electrical impulse and chemical it would normally receive from being part of the body.
Otherwise you lose information and god knows what happens.
I don’t deny the value of interaction via the Internet, etc.
To imply it is anywhere near replacing the information density of embodied physical contact is just a sign of a lack of information - education - about all this stuff.
Our bodies (and the sensations and emotions produced by them) are not primitive. They’re super sophisticated and we are nowhere near being able to replicate them.
There’s interesting work btw on the fundamentally intertwined nature of emotion and “rational” thought.
> Emotions are a drawback imo, the fact that they're so deeply intertwined with the logical parts is a drawback.
Homie I hope you eventually wake up and smell the coffee :).
Take away emotions, lol, and you literally are no longer a human being.
Lol take away emotions and you literally die - fear, anger, sadness,desire, hunger, joy, curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is an emotion. The joy of solving a problem, doing something with some slick and elegant logic? Emotion.
> We often act against our own best interests and health purely because we're afraid, for example.
Best interest? The very concept fundamentally depends on caring about something - being alive, the good of humanity, whatever. Caring about absolutely anything? An emotion :).
We actually are able to control a lot, but not all of our bodies. Once we accept that we are inherently emotional beings and work on being more conscious of our feelings and mindful ;).
FWIW while it’s a lifelong effort, practicing to neutrally observe our feelings and treat them more as data to analyze, without divorcing ourselves from them or denying them, is a powerful tool to counterbalance the ease of confusing a transitory feeling with one’s self and the counterproductive behavior or decision-making which often stems from that. AKA practicing mindfulness.
Lol which I’m not really doing, writing such a heated comment ;).
Laughter? Emotion.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but computers are perfectly logical and have no emotion and they’re not fucking alive.
Take a page from Commander Data’s book and try to appreciate the fundamental nature of humanity :).
Perhaps you're right. My opinion has only been formulated from my own experience, so it's very limited. Emotions have simply been a net negative for me, and I barely experience the good ones.
Word. And I appreciate your thoughtful response. Emotions aren't easy - they're work. Like with many things though, the work pays off over time.
The most surprising part of therapy to me was just how rational, analytical, and logical it all is. Like, things start to make sense which didn't before. Therapy has many components but identifying irrational distortions in our own thought processes is a huge part of it. Which strengthens our ability to rationally assess and interact with our own feelings as they arise.
Thus, counterintuitively, embracing emotional work actually decreases the discomfort/negative impacts of the unpleasant or negative emotions we wish to avoid. Unfortunately, avoidance actually makes it worse.
And therapy often feels unpleasant, but, so does exercise. And therapy's a lot less unpleasant than whatever motivates one to engage in therapy to begin with ;).
LOL FWIW I've basically found that personal growth is a process of discovering my own backwards/inverted internal logics. : /.
If the stuff I said before resonates, FYI, it's all basically cribbed from Buddhist thought or research on mindfulness (UCLA has a pretty good center doing mindfulness research & this is a good book: https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/fully-present).
I got lucky enough to be able to do (still do) a significant amount of therapy w/a skilled shrink (psychologist with Phd with at least some cognitive-behavioral background work, ideally having significant clinical experience) which has been a huge help to me. I also got lucky and the shrink in question had excellent judgement and was the right kind of person for me, which is critical. Seen bad shrinks too.
Lol so all this means I'm definitely biased from my own experience.
FWIW I hope you find opportunities to cultivate the good emotions as they arrive in your life, from a simple cup of coffee (or whatever you like) to whatever. In addition to it's own benefits, this has been shown to improve our ability to manage or mitigate negative emotions in a healthy way.
I don't do it enough but there's significant amounts of research showing that writing in a journal (about anything) about ten minutes a day has really positive mental health outcomes, as does making a daily short list of 2-3 small things (like coffee ; ) to be grateful for.
And of course stuff like exercise, yoga, some kind of physical activity. Sorry if I've gotten preachy - as you can tell it's something I have strong feelings about, hah, pun intended.
Point being, while I can't speak to your circumstances, as a general rule it's actually very simple and straightforward to apply (but simple isn't the same as easy! Doing 101 pushups - simple, not easy) all the good science around specific, straightforward techniques for increasing genuine and healthy positive emotions, and mitigating the discomfort of negative ones or sort of neutralizing them altogether.
And all of this eventually helps one cease any self-destructive coping/self-medication behaviors (which I have done/do) - drugs, alcohol, computer games, overwork, etc, which, in this context, beyond their moment of actual use, make negative emotions worse and make it tougher to experience positive emotions.
Like mastery of any skill it takes patience and time but pays off in a big way.
Everything you wrote is interesting, as I am trying to meditate and exercise more, figure out my own brain/mind and what exactly I can change in my life, so thank you!
Thank you as well, to the both of you. I really had nothing to say other than to observe the insightful wisdom displayed in response to my otherwise arcane comment. I _did_ play the devil's advocate a bit, to my own actual opinion. And was pleasantly surprised to see the backlash generate such helpful advice.
We are emotional systems first and foremost, not logical ones. Easy to get that one backwards ;-)
I like your analogy about desires. It is the most immediate rebuttal to pure ethereal logic.
Kind of interesting how as a society we seem to be rejecting it - a lot of technology enables us to be alone or at least not in direct contact with others.
I wonder what the ramifications of that will be in the future.