Emotion has always been a mystery, and necessarily so, since it is actually the main analysis system of the brain. Not of the human brain, but of all brains: from insects to homosapiens.
Intellect has also long been shrouded in ignorance, but not mystery. It has always been assumed our greatest strength, when it is in fact our main impediment, and hence reason for living. It is intellect that is the real cause of our often irrational behaviour, because of the way it conflicts with emotional analysis - a phenomenon known as basic human schizophrenia.
The brain consists of three main processing systems: intellect, emotion, and neurochemistry. What we think and experience is held in a tangible and complex form by the intellect, which resides in the cerebral cortex. It is this part which is responsible for thought and sensation and when we decide to do something it is this part which responds or is directly affected. By itself, the intellect is highly chaotic, if not insane, since it produces thoughts through a sort of battle between different neural networks.
Emotional processing guides the intellect by continuously analysing both it and the senses, in order to predict and simulate the likely practical outcome of particular thoughts and their associated actions. It does this by sampling activity in the cerebral cortex via the white matter, buffering it in the hippocampus, and processing it in the rest of the limbic system. This analysis is far more complex, comprehensive and linear than intellect is capable of, but is communicated to the intellect in a very simple form: an emotional response. This is done by dedicated pathways up from the limbic system, spread throughout the cerebral cortex.
Changing emotions control and nurture ideas by steering the thought process towards logical conclusions. Certain thoughts are therefore more likely to emerge in the presence of different emotional responses, with emotion controlling how active the thoughts are. Chemicals in the brain that act over large areas provides a further level of control, by preventing emotional responses from changing too quickly.
The result of emotional analysis in ultimately stored in long term memory, through analysis of the day’s experiences. This suggests there are four types of memory: short term, emotional, medium term and long term. Short term memory is the patterns of activity in the cerebral cortex. Emotional memory is the information buffered in the hippocampus, prior to analysis. Medium term memory is the information stored in the neural links of the cerebral cortex through experience during the day, with the help of emotional responses. Finally, long term memory is also stored in the links of the cerebral cortex, but is more complex, having undergone memory consolidation - a process of emotional analysis where the day’s experiences are analysed during R.E.M. sleep, with pauses in between for the neural links to stabilise. This explains why dreams seem meaningful, but are hard to understand: the meaning only exists at an emotional level, and is only as profound as the unification of long term memory.
An emotional response has three components: zero, positive, and negative, that combine linearly into three attributes: direction, probability and degree. Direction is whether an idea or sensation is predicting pleasure or pain, probability is how likely the outcome is, and degree is how severe the pleasure or pain will likely be. The three components are each felt alone as distinct primary emotions (surprise, love and anger), but when mixed produce all others.
The diagram above describes how varying amounts of the primary emotions of surprise, love and anger produce a linear spectrum of secondary and tertiary emotions. That is, emotions that consist of two or three of the primaries:
The last two are not usually recognised as emotions, because they result in emotional responses that change quickly. Laughing is caused when a negative idea with a beautiful expression causes love of the expression, which then leads to surprise followed by anger, as the idea itself is analysed. This prompts the intellect to focus on the beauty again, and so the cycle repeats. This is why laughter feels similar to jealousy (which is a similar combination of two closely related ideas) and never feels as good as love on its own. Some people who in addition to finding other people’s suffering sad, also find it interesting, will often laugh at inappropriate times for a similar reason. Laughing without a strong love component is called crying and is caused when negative emotions are intense enough to cause a person to search for a solution beyond current thoughts. Since (true) laughter and crying involve complex ideas these cyclical emotions are only observed in humans.
The following list provides the common names for the severe and moderate degrees of each of the 10 basic emotions:
Or at least this is how emotion works normally. However, there is evidence that the emotional processing system is capable of running alternative algorithms, such as simple idling, command interpretation, calculation of number sequences, database storage and retrieval, word processing, MIDI, image editing, etc. This is fortunately quite rare, since it must surely take an immense level of denial to retask normal emotional processing for much simpler applications.
Perhaps autism is the response to being “gifted” in psychology, but then later in childhood finding such inspiration to be impractical? The emotional processing system managing to reprogram itself to make the individual actually more normal?
“Mental illness” can also be explained by inspiration that is not particularly practical given the individual’s social setting. Being emotionally disturbed is the result of having more honesty, empathy, decency, courage, vigilance, etc, than normal, and also being unable to interpret the practical meaning behind it all. Individuals who should be scientists, artists, human rights activists, etc, instead get lost in mazes of delusion, as they try to make sense of their emotions and find meaningful roles in society. It doesn’t help that most assistance offered to them is designed to make them more normal, and thus trivialise their inspiration - ignoring the complexity of emotion behind it.
When experienced by the intellect, emotions combine with thoughts to form feelings. The cerebral cortex takes the complex analysis of a situation in simplified form and combines it with a specific idea. Most feelings that have been named consist of an emotion that has a strong love or anger component. This is because if it contains a strong surprise component, it means emotion doesn’t very much about the idea/situation, and thus intellect will be able to know even less. Here’s a short list:
The two systems, emotion and intellect, ideally work together, but can also oppose each other. When they work in unison the process is known as instinct, or intuition. When they are opposed the result can be personal hatred, religious fanaticism, and instinctive self education, also known as karma. The Buddhist Law of Karma was an early attempt to explain this process in physics, but it’s actually entirely psychological: emotional analysis uses minor mistakes to prevent more serious ones. This is why stupidity sometimes feels good - when it’s positive indirectly. Conscience is a more conscious version of this.
However, most of the time emotion neither combines with intellect nor opposes it, with the two systems complementing each other. This phenomenon is known as the art of intelligence, which differs between individuals depending on how much each will likely benefit from knowledge and skills in different areas. It is emotional analysis that judges whether inspiration will be practical for the individual or not, although being an artform, intelligence can form in many different and conflicting ways, including fragments of knowledge that don’t appear to make much sense.
Emotional analysis also operates socially, through art and culture, which explains why expression is much more able to inspire and offend than simple speech. On a large scale we have the zeitgeist (aka the mind of God), and on a small scale we have intimacy. Both are forms of communication, that operate on a direct emotional level, and are therefore more efficient than intellect.
The best example of this is sex, which uses all the senses and complex movement. Since the bandwidth for communication is so much higher than speech, emotional analysis is able to form a constantly changing meta language for transferring inspiration. This means that when two people have sex, they are exchanging the essence of each others individuality, which is why they are drawn closer to each other. Another example is conjoined twins, who are able to physically coordinate and live harmoniously in one body, even though they have separate brains - something that would be impossible if not for efficient communication beyond the intellect. Regular twins have similar minds for the same reason.
So if sex is so emotional, and such a positive experience, why is it so controversial? It’s because intimacy, and especially sexual intimacy, increases the individuality of those involved, which makes it harder for them to submit to power. This means that those individuals who are highly corrupted by power tend to avoid most forms of intimacy, and tend to be afraid, if not terrified, of passionate sex. They tend to compensate for this by either avoiding sex altogether, seek to have sex with those that are similarly impaired, or in the most extreme cases, have sex with those with less than normal adult human capacity. This explains sexual perversion (pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia), and thus also the infantilisation of women and dehumanisation of men inherent in traditional gender roles.
In conclusion, here are some of the implications of this theory:
By Mark J. Skinner.
Last modified: 2023-04-02 09:17:24 UTC.