Or is it a limited spectrum like color/visible light? I'm wondering if, with the way society develops, changes, and evolves, we will discover new emotions, or do we know every possible emotion and it's a matter of the combination, intensity, and cause of the emotion?
This is a bit abstract, but I've been reading lots of predictions for 2014 and I'm getting this weird, starry-eyed feeling except instead of stars it's like a digital, LCD film. I'm not by any means saying I'm experiencing a new emotion, but maybe with the continued obliteration between the digital and physical worlds (if those distinctions even exist anymore) it will give rise to discovering new parts of ourselves that have never been tapped before.
Ah, my friend, but your comparision is flawed (which I feel in a way answers you question): we see what colors we have names for. Best article So I say there are probably plenty of emotions out there we will 'discover.' Things we already feel but can't name because we don't have names for them yet, so we don't realize that they are more nuanced feelings. Words are beautiful and wonderful. Think about it. I am rarely angry but I am often irritated or frustrated. If I did not know the words for irritated or frustrated, I would just say "mad."is it a limited spectrum like color/visible light?
I've listened to the radiolab that talks about Homer and how blue didn't pop up until later: great podcast. Also the NPR interview is really converging with some insights I was having tonight that related to color, fashion, insecurity, and my identity. My mind is being blown tonight and I love it.
A quick google search turned up this somewhat relevant link : http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/emotions-which...
I don't think that humans collectively will turn up any new emotions, but to individuals, I think there are always new ones to be discovered. Even in my 30s, I have times when I feel a way that I've never felt before about this or that, both for negative and positive feelings. Obviously, we can't really impart our feelings to others, so although I know others have felt as I feel before, it's impossible to get the gist of a feeling through another's description. A feeling is purely qualitative; that is why we respect writers so much who have the ability to convey feeling through words, I suspect, because it's as if they've put themselves in our shoes and are able to tell the world exactly how we feel....do we know every possible emotion and it's a matter of the combination, intensity, and cause of the emotion?
Not at all. On the negative side, I recently got the experience of finding out how it feels to have a girlfriend of 4.5 years, who lived with me, and whom I supported financially and emotionally for quite a long time, fuck at least one other dude, possibly several, but she's too chickenshit to ever tell me the truth. Not that I care at this point. That was several months ago, and I'm not angry anymore. But at the time it was the lowest low I've ever felt. On the upside, I have a couple nieces who are young (one is 19 months, and the other is 4 months) who show me new meanings of the word love pretty much everyday. I have no idea how rewarding it must be to have kids, because even having nieces, I never knew that I could care about a human as much as I do them. They are nothing but joy to me, especially the older one now that she's getting to an age where she's beginning to talk and loves to play and such. Neither of these experiences were known to me (viscerally) before I had them personally. You can hear a million songs about how much it sucks when your girl is a terrible whore, and what a gift it is to love someone wholly, but if you don't know what it's like, then you don't know what it's like.
No shit. Me too. Although, maybe it has happened to me. My ex certainly didn't have a problem spending my money. And all I really got in return was occasional, boring sex. If that's not a whore, I guess I don't know what one is! Who knows what she got out of her other dudes on the side. I'm pretty sure they were all losers, though, so I don't think it was monetary.
Sorry to hear about the negative, but happy to hear about the upside. You're right, there really is no substitute for experiencing an emotion firsthand. I agree that capturing those kinds of experiences is why good writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other artists receive so much adoration. You've also helped strengthen my belief that a mark of a true artist, or at least one people adore and love, is a strong sense of empathy.
I think it depends on the language. Every language has its own names for emotions, some are missing one emotion and have other names for other sets and intensities of emotion that others do not have. For instance, in my native language there are 7 forms + 2 genders + diminutives for every word. We have a huge collection of words, which stand for one concrete thing, unlike in English. But I still miss a proper word for "Excited" as in [I am excited]. There is no possible way to tell "I am excited" in my language, despite having the word for "exciting". It just is impossible to fashion the word to the feeling due to grammar and it would sound very awkward. So we have to resort to use it in English, or improvise a whole new sentence to tell it. But English, Russian, Romanian, Polish and pretty much every language I know, lack the word for other emotion, which we have a name for - "Laime". English equivalent of "Laime" is "happiness". But Latvian equivalent of "Happiness" is "Prieks". You should treat the word "Laime" as a more joyful, happy, sincere and genuine word, divine word, something very special, even connected to love. We say "Priecks"/"Priecīgs" when we feel joy, moderate happiness about something - be it small things that make us happy, or be it a new car. It is like really genuine "Joy" in English (but Joy is not "Prieks", it is "Bauda"). We say "Laime"/"Laimīgs" when we feel so overwhelmingly happy and satisfied of everything - our life, children, careers, very sincere gifts. It is as pure emotion as it can be! It is something divine, uplifting, something what makes us forget all the trouble. Unfortunately, you will not find "Laime" used as often in Latvian as "Happy" in English, since "Laime" is much harder to achieve, nearly impossible in our day and age. The word is not therefore beat up and overused - it shows much stronger emotion when used properly. I use it when I feel endlessly, unconditionally in love. So, as for your question - I think we as a humanity have felt all the emotions, depends on our local culture and influences, if jealousy, hate, love, or other emotions are more acceptable than elsewhere. Our languages give words a far more significant meaning to the same emotions other people don't have the word for in most other languages. Fernweh, scriptulient, Ultracrepidarian, Waldeinsamkeit. Every language is a new treasure cove of words which you may never grok! You may live all your life feeling emotions you will never have the word for. There even is a word for a dance people accidentally dance when giving right of way to one another by stepping aside, but always end up in front of one another; can't find it right now. http://www.lsa.umich.edu/german/hmr/vokabeln/deutschhilfteng...
I over heard a friend saying, "of course Israelis are like that! Look at their language: they've got one word for 'happy' and 'eleven' for angry." It's obviously not true (well, the language part is true--13 'angry's vs 2 'happy's on wikipedia), but it made me think about how poorly words represent emotions sometimes. "Happy" is shown as this loud, flowery thing with lots of smiling and running around, but real happiness always happens to me like something really peaceful and warm.
Call me old-fashioned, or Faulknerian, but I find the taxonomy of emotion a silly endeavor in the first place, don't you? Moreover, to me, each instantiation of an established emotion feels partly new: every time I feel sad, the sadness feels different, though perhaps not different enough to cross the threshold into "new". Reminds me, while I'm on this literary jag, of Borges's Funes the Memorious:“I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”
—Faulkner"He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
I have to disagree on the point of taxonomy of emotion being silly: being able to clarify to those around you that you're, for example, anxious instead of sad is a huge advantage in the process of connecting with someone. I mean, I get the idea that a word is to a thing as a shadow is to a thing - a flat imitation - but that doesn't mean the word (or the shadow) is useless or that we can't learn by examining it. We're likely not going to get to the point where we can ever truly know what happens in another individual, but words certainly help with being communal.
Sometimes you're thirsty, but mistake it for hunger, so you eat without ever really being satisfied. I feel like emotions are the same. You can think you're bored but be anxious, passionate but really just angry, etc. I think we've got all the emotions, but I wonder if we'll ever find a way to get closer to being aware of our own emotions.
I hope so I found a bunch of new emoticons ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
I think we're going to start exploring the difference between empathy and sympathy and that in our exploration we'll find a deeper empathy than we knew before, all because of the internet. We've been sympathetic for a very long time, able to acknowledge the pain of others and offer our assistance, but with the amount of instant data that's floating around it's getting easier for us to put ourselves in others' shoes and actually empathize with them. I'm not sure if it's because we can 'cast a wider net' online and find more people like us or because the volume of exposure to different types of characters, from the rogue to the vixen to the troll, but I think those who approach the internet knowing there are people on the other end of the line are getting much more diverse interaction at a far cheaper cost than ever before. Now I'm rambling, so let me just summarize by saying EMPATHY!
I would love to see a collective genealogy of emotional generation throughout the developmental family tree of homo homo hubskapien. Like ol' Fred Nietzsche in "Genealogy of Morals" but somehow humping up against the leg of science instead of the human condition.
Hm, much as I hate to refer someone to Steven Pinker, mightn't The Better Angels of Our Nature be what you're looking for? And it seems like the Peter Singer's idea of the expanding moral circle is quite fashionable nowadays—both Singer and Pinker pay their dues to evolution, science, and whatnot. The humping imagery is hilarious, by the way. I'm picturing a tiny dog with a giant walrus/Nietzsche moustache.
I would tentatively say yes. Now, everything else I say is predicated on the idea that we will first have to be able to qualify/quantify emotion so we can look at a 'feeling' (My guess is some form of advanced FMRI) and see if it's a novel feeling, a subset of some other kind of feeling, or an entirely new form of 'feeling.' To give an example, if I create a well researched, thorough, fair and easily digestible post or comment on Hubksi/Reddit/etc, and that post doesn't do well, or is downvoted, ignored, one could say that I'm disappointed, but not in the same way that I would be if I had been stood up for a date, or was going to be late to an important event. This I think, is a failing of language, not of emotion. It's like the idea that Inuit people have hundreds of words for snow and ice, because they see distinctions between those types of snow and ice that a non-native doesn't have language for. So, as we delve into the neuroscience aspect of 'feeling' we should also explore, and thoroughly, the language of 'feeling' so that [The Sadness at the death of a parent] is differentiated linguistically from [The Sadness at the end of a teary movie] English, to give it some credit tries to distinguish 'sadness' from 'anguish' and 'sorrow,' to give examples, but because of the synonymous nature of English, they become symbolically equivalent. If you're 'sad' you can also be described as 'anguished' or 'sorrowful.'
I think major emotional responses are rooted in the structure of our brain- determined by our biological makeup- and perhaps we've discovered all the "major types" so to speak, there. However, I could see this changing with 1) augmentation (just as magnets implanted in the fingertips are already allowing humans to harness magnetoception as a seventh sense) or 2) awareness, categorization, or study into emotions gives names to increasingly subtle facets of emotion. However, for the first, augmenting the brain in a way that could provide it with new emotions could be a highly complex undertaking. After all the permutations of stimulation of existing brain structures are explored, the only extension would be hugely more technologically difficult (providing new structures for the brain to operate with). And for the second, there are diminishing returns of a kind when discovery comes from increasingly minute categorization. At some point, without changing the resolution at which people are able to identify emotions in themselves, such investigations become "pointless nomenclature" or "splitting hairs" to the average person. And while it may be useful for, I don't know, further theoretical modeling of emotions, if it doesn't lead to something that has practical use for this average person, it may fall out of favor.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1_horizon-do-you-see-w... Terence Mckenna posited something similar to the idea that we are evolving to greater abilities for imagination due to ever increasing levels of neurotransmitters/dmt. It's worth a ponder. To answer your question with another question: Can conscious beings who do not have emotions exist?