Home » A description of the Emotional Mechanics

As an Engineering student, I am not totally oblivious to the h istory of science and discovery. No matter how real something seems, and no matter how real one may perceive something to be, we have no place to ascertain anything as real until it can be proven or suggested to be real beyond any reasonable doubt. In writing this article I have made an attempt to describe the human mind, and I have done so without proof or any formal education in psychology. This article contains an idea, nothing more. Please don’t take it as an attempt to explain how everyone works, but rather as an expression of my own attempt at explaining my own emotions.

 

 

The only scenarios I will give in this essay are very simplified yes/no situations which would often have little parallel with real situations.

 

This essay makes 2 fundamental assumptions:

 

·          All situations, no matter how complex, are arranged by – and carried out by – the mind as a series of simple two-option scenarios. This assumption is required for the ideas presented in this article to work. I believe this to be true in each and every situation we encounter through our lives, you may or may not agree.

 

·          The mind has rigid definitions regarding how ‘good’ certain things are relative to each other. That is, the mind can say – with certainty – whether one Item is better than another. See the Item section in the introduction for an explanation of this term.

 

I cannot possibly explain the underlying mechanics behind each and every emotion, so all I will cover here is misery and joy, emotions which are not only paramount to our nature but also elementary components of the other emotions we experience.

 

I will now begin by elaborating on a term that will be repeated throughout the essay; the Item. Other terms which occur less frequently will be elaborated on in footnotes.

Basically, what I mean by an item is anything that gives a positive or negative emotional response of any magnitude. This can be anything from a physical item to any mental artefact the mind can conceive (i.e. any thing that crosses your mind – be it real[1] or not).

 

The mind has an emotional standard. This ‘standard’ is essentially a way for the mind to recognise the relative emotional worth of items without an arbitrary relative hierarchy. When we experience an emotion, it moves this standard.

 

Take a hypothetical situation where all items in an individual life are experienced at regular intervals. No matter what these items are (so long as they don’t include non-karmic items[2], which will be discussed later) the mind will ultimately adapt to a level of standard such that the mean of the induced emotions by all the items is in line with the standard. The person is now in emotional equilibrium, and theoretically experiences a slight ripple in emotional variation inversely proportional to the frequency of which the items in his or her life occur. The mean emotion experienced by this individual over a large period of time is neither positive nor negative. For the sake of this hypothesis suppose the individual experiences no variation of emotion (the items occur frequently if not continuously).

 

An item which is below the standard moves it down when the item is experienced, and one which is above the standard moves it up. This process takes time, and the rate at which the standard ‘level’ is moving induces emotion. We can now arrive at the following definition:

Whenever the mind observes an item (remember that an item is anything that the mind can conceive, be this materialistic or simply a thought) it makes a judgment on its value and which emotion it should pertain relative to the current standard. The mind also makes a judgement about the strength of the item, i.e. how strongly it relates to the current state of the mind. The mind then weighs together the importance of the item (how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ it is) against the strength (how strongly it relates to us) and then uses this information to place the item relative to the current standard.

 

If the importance of an item is low, but the strength is high, we might feel a strong emotion for it even though it’s not entirely epic. If the importance is high and strength is very low, we might not do anything about it. A good example is starving children in Africa. The relative importance of a starving child is very large, whereas the strength of the item is minimal, and as such we might not care enough to do anything about it.

 

Note that this idea of ‘importance’ and ‘strength’ could be thought of as one. Basically, when we consider an item, it will instantly give us an emotional influence based on how much we simply care. The weighing out of importance versus strength is little more than a good analogy to explain why two similar things can have very difference effects. An example is that 10,000 people dying in a distant country (high importance, low strength) would affect you less than your close friend dying (lower importance, high strength)). These are analogies, the important thing to understand is that an item gives an emotion based on its position relative to the standard, and that emotion is positive above the standard and negative below it.

 

This is something which is vital in understanding Emotional Mechanics. Emotion is a sense like every other. Emotion is a mechanism which observes and responds to a rate of change in the mind’s standard. The magnitude of the emotion is proportional to the rate of change, and is positive (happiness) if the standard is rising and negative (sadness) if it is falling.

 

This is a simple concept that can be difficult to understand (because it contradicts our ‘feelings’ on many levels), but it has far reaching implications, which will now be explained.

 

It is obvious that people get used to things. No matter what you have, you eventually adapt to it on some level, and the emotions it used to give will slowly become neutral, and you will be indifferent to it. Take the example of a guy and his car. If he loses the item (in this case the car) he will feel the ‘opposite’ emotion, and this is often something which can be confusing. I say this because if you have an item that once made you happy that you become used to, you will feel sadness when you lose it, and this misery of loss can often be confused with the loss of joy (as opposed to the loss of a neutral state of mind and the gain of misery).

 

What I have found to happen is that when you adapt yourself to an item that used to give you great joy, you begin to associate the ultimate lack of joy with a misery stemming from something else, and when you lose the item it feels as though your only source of joy is gone. This illusion serves to persuade the mind into attempting to regain the item. In actual fact, when an item that you have become dependant on is removed, you are simply experiencing the opposite of the ‘initial’ affect it had on you, like an emotional rebound effect whereby the mind must now experience pain of the same magnitude as the joy created by the item.

 

This is the Karma Phenomenon and the reasons for its existence are easily derived from Emotional Mechanics.

Take a hypothetical male who owns a car that he cares very much about. The individual is in emotional equilibrium, and experiences neither pain nor joy in his life as all items occur frequently. The car once gave him joy, because when he bought it, induced a positive rate of change in his life’s standard. The standard rose, but as it approached the new Emotional Equilibrium, its rate of increase slowly declined, and the car no longer gave him a positive emotion.

 

Suppose the person now loses the car. He is now in a state of misery as his standard moves down. Looking at his life, if he got his car back, he would still be in equilibrium and thus would no longer be happy. In fact, he would experience joy equal in magnitude to the misery of losing it, as the bar rises back to its equilibrium. This creates the desire to have the car back, because the pain would be removed if he were to have it back.

 

An interesting thing to observe from this is that, at the instant he loses the car, his standard is still just as high, yet he still wants the car back to avoid the rate of decline of the standard. The point of this is that the level of the standard plays no role in your emotion or desires; it is the rate of change of the standard that drives us.

Another obvious conclusion that the hypothetical male would draw is that his standard would not be declining if it were not for the things that were pulling it down (the car merely held it up, and there had to be things pulling it down) and suddenly he experience pain from things that otherwise would not have made him unhappy.

It really depends on the way he looks at the situation. One could say he was accustomed to the car and without it he must now readapt to not having the car, or that the car was giving him joy and was balancing the negative influences in his life, which he must now live with. Either is valid and logical, and this creates a ‘fork in the road’ which we often face in our lives.

If he takes the latter perspective, he will assume that the car was a source of joy, and he will naturally cling onto the memory of the car. The individual will now try his best to get the car back. This is the natural response and is what we would do if we did not have reasoning. As the individual longs for his car back, he is created mental simulations of the car, which will exist as items and exist above his standard for the period of their existence, dragging up the standard and creating joy. Once the thought item is gone, he will experience even more misery as his mind must now adapt to the lack of the car, but also to the loss of the imaginary item. This temporarily creates an even sharper rate of decline of the standard, and induces a temporary state of increased misery (until the mind adapts to the mild variation in standard created by the thought item). The individual’s craving to regain his car is now heightened; this can become a finite cycle as the individual will continually reinvent the item and delay the ‘healing’ process until he finds his car or the pain is slowly halted (although it takes much longer this way). This can also result in an addiction if the item itself is temporary, not just the thought item. This is the case with drug addiction, and it is the only response any non-reflective being would take if it could (like a simple-minded primate).

 

The rational response is something which I believe to be the defining difference between intelligent animals such as primates and the rest of life on this planet.

 

The rational response is the realisation that the path of Nature is essentially a loop for certain situations which does not serve much of a purpose. Choosing the rational response usually occurs from experience, especially in situations where the individual is trying to break free from strong loops such as drug addiction. In this case a heavy rational case[3] is required to counterbalance the immediate desires (short bursts of happiness from temporary items). The rational response accelerates ‘healing’ from emotionally distressing occurrences and is necessary to overcome addictions.

 

An individual’s ability to overcome his addiction is not merely a product of rational ability, but also other factors such as the strength of the addiction and the level of past experience.

Misery and joy are probably the most confusing emotions, and these are deeply related with the Karmic nature of mechanisms for emotion (i.e. items). When you adapt yourself to an item, the opposite of the initial emotion the item gave you is experienced to the same magnitude, and that emotion gives the illusion that life is less useful without using the item to give a positive emotion, and the mind is inclined to think in such a way that this emotion will not pass, when in contrast the emotion itself could be considered as the observation of the mechanism by which the mind readapts without breaking the first Karmic law.

 

For example, if you have an item that makes you happy, you will eventually adapt to it, and when you lose that item you will feel sadness, and you will be inclined to think that without the item your life will be of less worth, you will also be inclined to think that time will not make you happier, when in point of actual fact, the pain you are feeling is the mind readapting to the loss.

 

The mind is a device which obviously exists to aid our survival. The hierarchy of items (how ‘good’ something feels compared to other things) is closely related to how useful it is for us to survive, and this explains why we struggle to regain good things when they are lost, and are less inclined to want change when we are happy. Remember that joy is the increase of our standard, which is a process the mind does not want to affect (because we are ‘rising’, i.e. getting ‘better’). Sadness is a process of declining standard, which is something we want to avoid and reverse.

 

The mind has a standard, and this standard is based relative to items – many of which are physical. In societies where item fluctuations are drastic and not regular, it is obvious to see why definitions of ownership arise, as individuals begin to easily realize that the Path of Nature can be used to avoid misery by an abundance of possessions.

Emotions exist to govern our perspectives, and the way in which we see the world, but they cannot govern actions. In people, the prospect of taking an action ultimately has to pass through the rational mind, where the perspectives (governed in part by emotions) will be weighed against past experiences (which, again, have been created by this process). In the case of a black and white scenario, where a simple yes/no action is to be decided upon by an individual, the action promoted by the emotion will only be taken if it either agrees with past experience or is strong enough to outweigh the results of past experiences. This is a very simple process and is, in essence, the main system of thought involved in the seemingly complex process of decision making. There are other systems involved such as learning through other’s teaching and mental emulation, but these are more complex and less have much less weight, unless the emulation or the teachings result in the promise of a dramatic loss.

 

To clarify, a decision is basically just an observation we make. We take a factor (be it past experience, learning, emulation, perspective) and then combine it with the strength (or seriousness) of what it promises. We then add them all together, and the decision (yes or no) that comes out on top is made.

 

For example, take a little boy who is deciding whether or not he should steal a lolly. He takes a look at the lolly, the first factor is his perspective, and the strength of what it promises is great (the lolly tastes very good). The second factor past experience; he has taken one before, and he got yelled at, this made him sad and thus the strength of what this factor promises (emotional grief) is, say, a little smaller than the pleasure of eating. He then considers a third factor, learning, and he has been taught not to steal. Of course, he doesn’t care less about this and when he considers a final factor (mental emulation, i.e. imagination) he sees himself running away successfully with the lolly. His mind computes the value of these factors and then decides (with total objectivity) that he should eat the lolly.

 

Indecisiveness at this level is non existent and the only reason it manifests itself in our behaviour is due to a complex clash of several sub-decisions being made, the brain is essentially going through a series of these scenarios (through smaller sub-scenarios created by our imagination). We essentially get stuck in a small loop until either a decision is made or a rational analysis of the rational decision making process itself (should we continue or stop?) is carried out and it is decided to stop and pick an action based on only one influencing factor (as opposed to weighing them out), this is usually what happens when people get impulsive and decide ‘fuck it, I’ll just do it’.

 

I don’t want to go too deeply into decisiveness because it is too complicated.

There are some items whose importance is not arbitrary, like the items that have been considered so far. These are basically what we would normally refer to as basic needs. Basic needs include food (lack of hunger), physical comfort[4], love[5] and purpose[6].

 

If we are lacking any of these basic needs, the individual will be inclined to live in a state of declining standard. That decline will decrease with time if it is not affected, but it will be difficult for other items to affect that decline, although as it progresses, items will be less inclined to cause misery and more inclined to cause joy.

 

Essentially what I am implying here is that the lack of a Basic need is not something one can adapt to, although it will adapt the individual to other items by inducing a decline in standard. If you are starving and lonely, you will most likely be unhappy for as long as you are in that state, but as soon as you start eating and interacting with people, you will have gained a higher appreciation of it and all other things in your life.

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