instantly free yourself from your emotions

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
1

i am not a licensed psychologist, and pulled this all out of my ass with the help of an evolutionary look at “how the mind works” by steven pinker. i dont think he actually mentions any of this, but basically the idea that your brain came from evolution seems to fit here.

humans and most if not all mammals have been naturally selected to include three emotions: happy, afraid and angry. happy was naturally selected for when you do something thats good for your body (actually, for the reproduction of your DNA, which usually includes your body) things like eating and having sex. afraid is for recognizing danger and avoiding it. anger is for asserting your dominance over things that might become afraid of you and subsequently not eat your food.

and when you get sad, its like fear (i made that up). youre afraid of the future and what its going to be like now that something bad about it is being considered (my friend died, life is pointless, US foreign policy really is evil).

but fear wasnt designed for this purpose. humans werent designed to understand what the distant future will be like. we were designed like mammals, and the more complex parts of our brain like language and inference were designed for more immediate, animal needs, and were merely coincidentally capable of being harnessed for those complicated things.

you are just an animal. and when you feel fear, you are supposed to make a decision; your brain is expecting you to. do i kill that scary thing, or do i run away? in case you run away, your body has gone through the trouble of lubricating your eyes and nose (you call it crying).

but the things that make you sad cant be attacked or ran from. so you just sit there, with a lion right in your face and you know hes gonna stab you soon, and you cant even put your hands up to block it.

so what do you do? you tell yourself its not so bad to get stabbed by a lion. you know its going to happen, you know there is no way to change the future that you are afraid of. the whole reason why fear was naturally selected was to cause you to take action, but when there is no action to be taken, you need to tell your brain that.

telling yourself that crying is a natural thing and you need to get it out of your system is only going to reinforce your fears and make them even more real. hopefully the apparently reccomended process of crying out your sadness on purpose actually just makes you eventually realize how ridiculous you look, that would make more sense.

emotion aimed at things that you cannot change is always unhealthy. anger aimed at things that dont feel fear or shouldnt, fear of things that you know are going to happen and that you have fully planned for, sadness about how your future is going to be now that somethig bad happened in the past. all of these things will never make your life better, and if you cant tell your brain to ‘shutup about it already youre making us look stupid’, then maybe you should ask what else you arent in control of up there.

(i understand momentary bursts of emotion, im no weirdo, it happens to me. but for like ten minutes. i cant remember anything ever lasting longer than a good nights sleep)

so is any of what i said based on actual facts? is any of it definetely not true? am i going to go on a shooting spree while crying my eyes out because i have been “repressing” my emotions? what exactly causes this “repression” that i hear about on sitcoms?

2

or…

take a couple of tranqs

3

I think your totally right future man. The theory is rather simplified, but its basically whats going on. I was actually thinking about this last night. Nature is economical, and thus does not start from scratch, our brains have the structure of ‘lower animals’. The human factor is the neo cortex, which rides the Limbic system, and R complex, like a jockey riding a horse. Thus we cannot escape our animal nature. Fear of certain things was most definetly favoured by natural selection. If you didn’t fear your predator then you wouldn’t be around for all that long, would you? !!!

All animals are anticipatory machines, The lower brains, Limbic, and Rcomplex, have been perfectly tuned to react to present situtions. This still implys time, yet it is time on a very very short scale. We see the prey we attack. ITs a quick, recognize react function. Now with the Vast expansion of the neo cortex, combined with culture(the invention of language) we have the ability to extropolate farther and farther into the future, and this is what we are constantly trying to do. How am I supposed to invest in the market? Should I look for another job? How do I go about getting my report on time? Is the universe going to die in a massive heat death, or is the universe just going to expand infinitly, and die a cold death?

With new anticipatory ability we’ve been able to understand many dangers that face us, Hell I can’t walk out the door without being able to identify a hundred things that could kill me, I could fall, be hit by a car, I might be getting skin cancer, that girl down the street is hot, but If I actually manage to score my dick could break out in lesions that I’ll have for life, I see the newspaper in a store window notifying me that Al Qaeda is perparing to attack again, someone got shot down the street from me last night… Our ‘lower systems’ in the triune brain seem to interpret these reasonable future predictions of possibility as real, thus throwing our nervous systems into fight or flight modes, that are competely unecessary lead to high blood pressure, stroke and death… SO STOP WORRYING NOW OR YOU’LL DIE!!! :astonished:

Lovely. The trick I think is to make yourself to understand that these are all theoritical constructs. I find certain forms of meditation is helpful, zen, and buddhism are very silly philosophies, but their attempt to quiet the mind is not in vain. I like tai chi, and yoga as they provide me with a body awareness, but again the philosophies behind these practices are silly. Just from time to time it is useful to relax the brain. If not you’ll die in an anylitical hell.

The question I came to last night though was, Can fear be avoided via natural selection??

You see these people all the time who can barely cope because of depression, and anxiety… these people have problems being social and such(obviously this is not beneficial). Most of the people we truely admire, are fearless, the super succesful… could natural selection favour those who see fear as unneccesary? Could we in someway devise methods so that most could come to this realization analytically? Mankind has no natural predators now, we have no need for the flight, fuck, or fight… or do we?? Can the fearless be the initiatiors of a baldwin effect?? Can we create a selection pressure to rid ourselves of fear?

4

??? - Are we talking about STD or violent girlies?
Dan says:
Both parties should try to be mild, soft and gentle.

There are two main emotional sexual foundations [imo]
#1
Excitement: Leads to crazey banging. Is dangerous and insane.
So maddening! So intence! [ect., etc.]
#2
Comfort: Finding a very nice and soft partner to work with. Wont hurt.
Finally, someone you can trust… She is just so beautiful, you know she will never hurt you. You can, at last, have peace. etc.

Hopefuly…

Yup. Gotta remember that one.

When I realized what humanity actually was…
It was like all my dreams had a death sentance…
Damn!..
So then I started to think this instead:
“All that matters is that people are happy. Insanity, if not hurting anyone or paralizing social skills/ability to work, is far better then the vast and brutal realism that depresses the minds to death.”

It’s too much… After I learned enough facts it was just too much for me. If I were to return to my old gods of escapism and the mundane, then I would offer up my will, and they would repay me with peace and pleasure, because… if there is no God and we are mere animals… all bound to die and lose all we are/have… then absolutely nothing matters anymore!
So, escapism and mundane, please save my life and give me power. Please return me to the non-thinkers and the opinionated, incomplete views… Please stop my doom somehow.

Truth, you are the coldest of ice. My sacrifices to you were my souls dreams and my every desire, and each was killed on the sacrificial stone of objective and holistic logic. Far back I stood as I looked and the species and gathered facts. Truth, I gave you so much, and you gave me nothing in return other then a simple scroll that held all pain in full word and understanding.

Goodbye truth… You and I were never meant to be together.

5

that almost is natural selection. if only they died before having children.

what we really should do is breed perfect humans once we get a hold of genetic engineering.

6

We don’t need genetic engineering to breed humans . . . look at the success we’ve had with our livestock and minimal knowledge of genetics. Humans are waaaay behind the curve on that one.
Designer babies, that’s gonna be the province of genetic engineering.

7

Yeah that is the problem, they breed before their stupidity becomes lethal. Do monks have sex?? Or do they take vows of celebecy? I’m inclined to think they take the celebecy vow, if they didn’t though it would be neat to see a study done on later generations of monks. Its well known many of these people can trick their brains into not recognizing pain as a danger. They train themselves to accept it. I remember the stories, and pictures of some chinese invasion where the monks started to light themselves on fire, and were smiling!!! I wonder if they did breed would later generations of monks be born closer to a state of non fear? and if so would this have dangerous side effects, or would it be an advantage?

I’ve most surely jumped to an irrational idea here, asking if fear could be escaped via natural selection. After giving it a bit of serious thought, I really think we do need fear. Iterated prisoners dillemmas don’t work if theres no retribution strategy, and if we didn’t fear retribution our selfish nature would most likely destroy us, hence in game theory selfish strategies do well when there are suckers in the population, but once they’ve become extint the whole population quickly joins them.

The question now is can natural selection cure us of stupidity?? Again most likely not, although I wish it were possible. At this very moment thousands, and thousands of trailer park trash, living of of welfare, and still believe in the pull-out method are curing their bordem by screwing their sisters, while watching doctor Phil.

8

im pretty sure that whatever you train youself to do after you are born doesnt translate back into your dna. so if you took someone who is, genetically, a scaredy cat and train him into a monk, he and his children will still have scaredy c genes.

however, the people who end up being monks and who end up succesfully completing this training most likely are genetically non-scared, and therefore their children would also be more genetically non scared than normal. the monk training would be a gene-finder as opposed to a gene-creator.

its not irrational at all. in fact, in the future, if humans live long enough such that they continue to have kids after the point at which most men die of stress related disease, this natural selection is exactly what will happen over the course of the next million or so years.

and i think the prisoners dillemmas will actually be enhanced by the replacement of fear with rational risk management. just because you dont sweat, cry and tighten your neck muscles doesnt mean you cant anticipate negative consequences. and actually, when dealing with more complex situations than ‘big thing moved, must run away’ it would probably help your decision making process if you are more relaxed, careful and rational while it is happening.

9

Of course you are right. If they aquired the traits from the training it would be a Lamarkian fallacy to inherit the traits. Yeah the monk training would be the filter, but how are these monk societys regulated? Are you born a monk? It was my presumption, that it was not really regulated, so that this monk training, or rather opting to become a monk would be the deciding factor. I’m seriously going to have to look into this. I’ve often wondered how many studies have been done on monks, and the “zen masters”.

True the prisoners dillemmas could possibly enhanced. Good point.

still it leaves us with the problem that most people have children at ages where the stress related diseases do not carry much weight.

10

anger allows me to blow up on someone who has crossed the line.

Living in anger allows me to be controlled by a singular emotion. causeing me to have a simple dirrection of death and violence. A survival of the fittest mode that resembles gang mentallity.

11

enlightening :confused:

12

I say combat stuborness with equal and opposite stuborness,… leaving intellect and or compramize as the only way out.

Yet then again you have to know your battles. And somethings you just have to focus on what you can control, and leave the rest up to God. That’s why they say to pray for your enemies. Just to bad most of my enemies don’t pray themselves. Some people need to be let known that they are in the wrong,… but then these same people probably don’t care about others as much as themselves. They only care about others that allow them to continue as they are. Like drug addicts that only hang out with other drug addicts.