[MD] William James a wrong track..

[skutvik at online.no]

John..

12 Mar. 

Dave T.. before:
> > "Tomkins believes that faces-even faces of horses-held valuable
> > clues to inner emotions and motivations."

John:
> Horses are a great teaching tool about the fact of emotions in
> non-humans.  I  read a sci fi book once where the matriarch of the
> colony imported horses because she believed that full human
> potential needed such experiences- relating to non-human emotional
> beings,  for fully realized development.

Strange situation this: Most people insist of emotions being biological. 
You agree with me that they are social, but then your "social" is far 
down into the biological, so confusion remains. IMO emotions in the 
true sense are the Q-SOCIAL "expression", but because SOM's 
mind/body matrix overrules most people's "moq" they have no way of 
dealing with the Q-bio and Q-socio levels, but keep anthromorphizing. 
The wild eyes, pounding heart trembling .... etc. with animals 
becomes panic, anxiety, fear ...etc. as if animals "says to themselves 
"Please God, I am about to die ..."          

> Royce also makes that point. And there's nothing like sitting on the
> back of a 1700 pound beast, to make you pay attention to what its
> feeling.  Horse sense is all about emotional intelligence, and
> nothing else. 

As said horses are an highly complex mammal organism capable of a 
rich biological repertoire. They are also very intelligent and live in 
herds in the wild, but their intelligence is in biology's service, their 
quasi-social  behavior has nothing to do with the Q-social value.     

> I've said it before, but it bears repeating, emotions are socially
> caused, biologically expressed.  When somebody or something
> threatens the aware self (a social construct),  biological chemicals
> react to that awareness and cause the expressions of heart-beating,
> flush-faced reaction.  

But here we agree. The social level can "commandeer" the biological 
level to give emotions bodily signs, but these signs must not be 
mistaken for purely biological reactions. I mean a human anxiety 
attack causes a pounding heart, but this heart rate has nothing to do 
with that of an animal sighting a foe, it is just readniness for flight.        

> But some sort of ego is needed to perceive any "biological"
> threat and the only way I can see to have any sort of "self" is
> through relation with "other".

Well there certainly is a biological self as there is a social and 
intellectual, but "ego" is an intellectual construct - the subject.

> Biological threat.  God I'm tired of that term.  What is a
> biological threat, anyways?  Is starvation?  Drowning? Eaten by a
> bear?  Is it just a term for "fear of biological death?"  It doesn't
> make sense to me, the way it's used on this forum, as if "biology"
> was out there lurking, ready to kill us.   Biology is the life
> force, not the death force.  That's as bad as those christians with
> their doctrine of "fallen nature".

Used by who? No need to be coy Roy? 

Bodvar