Qiaochu_Yuan comments on How to offend a rationalist (who hasn't thought about it yet): a life lesson - Less Wrong

9 Post author: mszegedy 06 February 2013 07:22AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 06 February 2013 09:46:40PM 2 points [-]

What are you referring to by "this way"?

Comment author: OrphanWilde 06 February 2013 09:53:23PM *  3 points [-]

"first you feel an emotion, then your brain guesses a reason why you feel that emotion"

To explain why this is completely alien to me:

First, I rarely even notice emotions. To say I feel them would be stretching the concept of "feel" quite considerably. "Observe" would be closer to my relationship with my emotions. (Except in the case of -extremely- intense emotions, anyways; it's kind of like a fire a hundred yards away; I can see it when it's over there if I look in its direction, and only feel it when it's really quite significant) Second, I don't have any kind of... pointer, where I can automatically identify where an emotion came from; my brain isn't performing such a function at all.

I also haven't noticed in my relationships any indications that people do have any kind of intuitions about where their emotions come from. Indeed, it's my experience that a lot of other people also don't have any kind of direct knowledge of their own emotional state except in extreme situations, much less any intuitions about where that emotional state arises from. If we did have either of these things, I'd expect things like depression wouldn't go unnoticed by so many people for so long.

Comment author: pcm 07 February 2013 02:27:05AM 3 points [-]

There's a lot of variation in how aware people are of their emotions.

You might want to look into Alexithymia.

Comment author: Clarity 28 February 2016 03:41:48AM 0 points [-]

I wrote a poem about the phenomenon:

Vague feeling inside Whatever you interpret it as You will feel Is it depression? Anxiety? Happiness?

Self fulfiling prophecy CBT............

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 06 February 2013 10:06:47PM 2 points [-]

I'm not inside your brain or your friend's brains, but that doesn't sound typical to me.