[MD] William James a wrong track..

[skutvik at online.no]

Mati 

13 Mar. you wrote :

> 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.

OK who am I to stop you? 

> 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. 

A touching story Mati, but would a purely biological being - an animal 
- grieve the death of a parent, and it must if emotions origin is in 
biology. Grief, mourning .. etc. are genuinely human and as such 
social patterns. That the social level has biology "at its disposal" and 
causes (in this case)  tears, sobs, face grimaces and so on is plain. 

The fact that you could control the feelings by suppressing the 
biological expression I would think was was your intellectl's objective 
realization that the funeral speech would turn into a farce if you gave 
in to emotions and thus took control of both society and biology.  

Bodvar before (to David T.)
> > 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,

You speak from the premises that emotions are biological, i.e. that 
animals have emotions, but only with the social level and language 
did the humans (organism) become able understand its mute 
sensations as emotions. I am emotionally sorry (!!) but this is wrong 
IMO. You treat language as some "objective understanding"  - as 
intellect while it for ages was just a social communication tool. It 
surely communicated emotions too, but these did not stem from a 
mute biological past but from the pre-language social past.       

> 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.

Yes, yes, biological instincts are immensely strong, and these are 
common for all organisms (self-preservation f.ex) - the human 
included - but emotions are something that lingers and would not only 
include missing the young, but be extended to hatred of the person 
who took it away and the need for revenge.   

> 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. 

SOM has no "social level". No levels at all, just a material world 
where life is matter becoming alive by chance and then - when brain 
complexity reaching some critical point - becoming conscious. The 
social level is genuinely a MOQ construct - the one that brings so 
much clarity    

> Understanding emotions is I would agree a social phenomenon, but
> experiencing them is originally a biological one. 

The social level employs the biological to convey its emotions. Like 
Pirsig says about all upper levels do the lower.  

Bodvar