[MD] William James a wrong track..

[KAYE PALM-LEIS]

Bodvar,

I woke up early and able to get out this one post. There are few items
I take issue with you but this is one.  As a general statement I would
suggest emotions are biological in nature. However, just like language
straddles both social and intellectual, emotions straddle both
biological and social.  Dave's note that smile can make you happy, I
learned that the opposite is true was sell.  A number of years ago my
father past away.  We were very close and emotionally I was
devastated.  The night before his funeral, which my brother and I were
to speak, I had to run home to get something.  I was a five hour round
trip.  So as I was driving, I practice my talk I was to give at the
funeral and invariably emotions would swells and I had to stop both me
and the car.  This happened several times until I noticed that I would
grimace just before the emotions would overwhelm me.  I learned that
if I didn't grimace and relax my face it was enough to stop
overwhelming emotions to overcome me.  To me that suggested
controlling the muscles in my face, which seemed to start a biological
response to my grief, was enough to hold the emotions at bay and the
next day at the funeral I was able to hold it together until the very
end.

Bodvar
> Very interesting, but it does not go against "emotions as the social
> expression", it only disproves SOM in which view emotions are mental
> and not supposed to have any effect on the material body. In the MOQ
> the levels interact freely upwards and downwards, no material/mental
> border to be crossed  .... BTW another proof that Pirsig's about
> inorgany and biology = material and society and intellect = mental is
> faulty .

Your point is interesting as well.  However as the social world,
through language, would define the world around it, including
emotions. Hence we in turn able to anthropomorphize our human
understanding of emotions onto them which never works because as you
point out animal don't have the capacity to understand emotion,
however I would suggest that they experience them very similar.  On
the farm as a kid when a calf was born there was a instinctual bonding
of cow and calf.  Once you took the calf away from it's mother, it
would get stressed and try to search out the calf and respond to the
loss of the calf.  Take away a baby from a human mother, I would
suggest you would find a very similar response.

>It's not capable of standing in the stable
>imagining situations and becoming mentally ill. Nor of love, regret,
>blame, remorse ...and the host of true human social emotions.

Imagining situation is part of the reflective understanding of what
emotions are.  I would so very humbly suggest that perhaps the idea of
emotion as strictly social is also a fallout of SOM. Understanding
emotions is I would agree a social phenomenon, but experiencing them
is originally a biological one.

Take care always,
Mati