Spinoza's Emotions

[Kaienne]

If this is something that's well known of around these parts, I apologize for posting it unnecessarily, but this dude Benedict de Spinoza did a real darn fine job at quantifying the human emotions and boiling them down to their base elements. Granted that it takes a certain degree of psychology to break down the walls people put up, I thought it might be in the spirit of the BIP to make notice of it.

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/spinozasemotions.html

[Cramulus]

que aristotelian

[Payne]

I thought so too. Where's all the middle ground at?

[LMNO]

I had to stop at :

Joy is man's passage from a less to a greater perfection.  [We feel joy when we improve our abilities to deal with what life hands us.]

I feel joy when I listen to the Stooges "Funhouse".


And I ain't passing through shit.

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

que aristotelian

Indeed. Emotions vary too much between people to be effectively reduced to a one sentence axiom.

[Kaienne]

I feel joy when I listen to the Stooges "Funhouse".

Why do you feel joy when you listen to that?

The human mind is a calculatable and quantifiable entity. Every effect has a cause, which has an effect, which has a cause, and so on and so forth. Break it down into it's most basic methods, and you can reduce that particular cause or effect to a one-sentence axiom.
Emotions have archtypes.

[Cramulus]

The human mind is a calculatable and quantifiable entity. Every effect has a cause, which has an effect, which has a cause, and so on and so forth. Break it down into it's most basic methods, and you can reduce that particular cause or effect to a one-sentence axiom.
Emotions have archtypes.

[ ] strongly agree
[ ] agree
[ ] neither agree nor disagree
[ ] disagree
[x] strongly disagree

[AFK]

Even the latest brain research hasn't been able to crack more than 10 to 15% of the human mind.  There is still much that we do not understand. 

[tyrannosaurus vex]

it might be true that every person might, if pressed or interested enough, find a way to reduce each of his emotions to a single-sentence axiom.

but you'd never find any two people who
a) categorize emotions the same
b) use the same axioms

so even if it's possible to reduce *your* emotions to a one-sentence axiom, and it's possible to reduce *mine* to that as well, it's still meaningless because your axioms and my axioms will be incompatible.

[Iron Sulfide]

and thus, we have religions.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

cake brings me joy.


cause its full of sugar and covered in FROSTING!!!!

SWEEEET SWEEET FROSTING!!!

[Triple Zero]

The human mind is a calculatable and quantifiable entity. Every effect has a cause, which has an effect, which has a cause, and so on and so forth. Break it down into it's most basic methods, and you can reduce that particular cause or effect to a one-sentence axiom.
Emotions have archtypes.

[ ] strongly agree
[ ] agree
[ ] neither agree nor disagree
[ ] disagree
[ ] strongly disagree

[x] plain and simply false

(except the bit about emotions having archetypes, but point me at one thing that doesn't have an archetype and you'll break your finger)

[LMNO]

I feel joy when I listen to the Stooges "Funhouse".

Why do you feel joy when you listen to that?

Because Iggy and the Stooges fucking rock, that's why.

The human mind is a calculatable and quantifiable entity.

Wrong.  The brain, maybe.  Someday.  Certainly not yet.

Every effect has a cause, which has an effect, which has a cause, and so on and so forth. Break it down into it's most basic methods, and you can reduce that particular cause or effect to a one-sentence axiom.

That has nothing to do with the definition of "joy" that is given as it applies to my joy at listening to the Stooges.

[B_M_W]

The human brain is one of the most complex biological organs science has ever come across. The problem with reducing its processes to single sentence statements is that its very synergy makes it so much more than the sum of all the parts. Plus, you can't just generalize about these thing.

You already know how I feel about this though.

[Cramulus]

I just read a passage in Black Swan in which the author is talking about causality. The passage is about how things happen, then afterwards we come up with a neat explanation for "why" they happened that way. But in fact, nothing is so simple.

Even if you try to figure out why you got a sesame bagel this morning instead of your usual cinnamon raisin bagel, there are a variety of tangled "causes" and no singular answer accurately sums it up. The human mind uses a mechanism which Taleb calls "Retrospective Determinism" (what a great phrase!) to construct a story.