Emotions and the Nature of Consciousness

** by Reginald Firehammer **

The emotions and desires are non-cognitive, only reason can tell us how to fulfill our desires or what our feelings mean and what the source of them is, but desires are the motivators of life, and if we desired nothing, there would be no reason to do anything, even to think; and our feelings make it possible to experience and enjoy our lives directly, and without them there would be no reason to live. Since I have already written about the nature of emotions and their significance, psychologically and epistemologically, in my two articles Feelings and Desires, this will only address the nature of the emotions and feelings as they directly relate to the nature of consciousness.

As far as I know, Rand is the only philosopher who has pointed out what may be the most important fact about emotions.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are tabula rasa. It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

[The Virtue of Selfishness, 1. The Objectivist Ethics]

The emotions are automatic physiological reactions to the content of consciousness, but like all behavior, while the mechanism for emotional reactions is there, at first, the emotional reactions are very general and non-specific and must be developed to become the rich source of desire and feeling experience by an adult. While the infant is able to experience the internal feelings of comfort/discomfort—pain/pleasure states of the body, and quickly learns to feel happy when comfortable and experiencing pleasure and unhappy when uncomfortable or experiencing pain, the other emotions require a great deal more development.

For example, with the exception of things which startle, like loud noises or sudden movements, an infant does not experience fear until it learns that some things are fearful, and doesn’t experience a desire for any particular food until it has learned what different foods are and has actually tasted them. This process is extremely complex and requires a separate treatment—for this post, the fact that the emotions are not given but learned is all that is important. The remainder of this post will describe some of the aspect of the emotions as they directly relate to consciousness, and assumes a more or less normal development of the emotional mechanism.

Automatic Physiological Reactions

The discovery that the emotions are not some impalpable ethereal things occupying some inchoate aspect of consciousness that everyone knows we have but cannot exactly identify comes as both a shock and disappointment to many people. After all, how does one describe those feelings we call pathos or grief, what words can give shape or color to such feelings as joy or delight?

The feelings or emotions, including those desires we feel, (some desires are intellectual), if we truly have them, are conscious experiences, and all conscious experiences are perception. Since we can only be directly conscious of (perceive) that which exists physically, those feelings we are conscious of, our emotions, must have a physical source—there must be some physical substance or events which correspond to the emotions. The physical source of the emotions is the body, and the emotions themselves are our perception of certain physiological events.

Those physiological events are automatic responses to the content of consciousness. The phenomenon is quite apparent in some cases, for example fear. When someone is confronted, especially suddenly, by something threatening, like a vicious animal or a man with a gun, the feeling of fear is identified with the racing of the heart, the tightening of the throat, and overall stiffness, and rolling of the stomach. There are more generalized feelings as well, caused by the hormonal changes accompanying the consciousness of something immediate danger.

Consciousness First

That the emotions are reactions to the content of consciousness is not always obvious, but can be demonstrated easily enough, and is apparent almost the moment we pay attention to it. We do not feel afraid unless we are actually experiencing a frightening situation or thinking about something frightening. The moment a thought of something frightening is in our consciousness, whether only a thought or an actual experience, we have the feeling.

The experience is the same for all feelings. Even the degree of feeling is determined by the nature of that we are conscious of. The feeling of anger has a very wide range, from minor annoyance to almost irresistible rage. The feeling of anger, and it’s degree are determined almost entirely by what we are thinking. We feel minor annoyance at small disappointment that we judge to have no major consequence to our lives, are temporary, or easily repaired—a deeper kind of anger comes from those things we judge to be serious wrongs that threaten real harm or are serious unearned insult. But notice, even the deepest kind of anger will be dispelled instantly by a change in one’s consciousness such as discovering the suppose wrong is a misunderstanding, or being suddenly confronted with an emergency that draws all our attention away from the thing that angered us.

No Subconscious

The field of psychology has been plagued by the pseudo-concept of the subconscious since it’s invention by Freud, with further embellishments added by Anna Freud and Jung, and has never recovered from it. There is no scientific or philosophical basis for this concept at all, though Ayn Rand was fooled by it. There are at least aspects of the emotions which are conflated with other legitimate concepts and false concepts to create this fictional concoction called the subconscious or unconscious mind. Three of the legitimate concepts are distinct and well understood: memory, emotions, and habituation. I will discuss the nature and importance of habituation under the volition thread. Here I will explain three aspects of the emotions that have enabled psychologist to pull off their greatest scam: the generalized nature of some emotions, the syndromic nature of emotions, and the implications of the physiological nature of emotions.

Generalized Feelings

While the specific physiological aspects of some emotions (such as fear) are easily identifiable, other emotional reactions to consciousness are less specific and generalized. It is the less specific feelings that give the impression emotions are, in some sense, vague independent conscious events. Such feelings as happiness or sadness do not seem physiological, because we do not associate those feelings with any specific part of the body; nevertheless, we can and do identify specific general physiological conditions with those feeling, such as the feeling of eagerness and energy we feel when happy, or a sense of listless discouragement when sad. Whether they seem physiological or not, we know that consciousness can only be conscious of physical phenomena, which in the case of all internal feelings means some aspect of our physical body.

It is because some feelings are general and vague that psychology has been able to treat emotions as something a bit nebulous, as though they were without cause, and, just there, and as though they had some mysterious inexplicable cause called the subconscious. By understanding the true nature emotions, these mistakes of psychology can be avoided.

The Syndrome

Another generally unrecognized aspect of the emotions is the fact that as emotions, they are part of the content of consciousness. Since the emotions are themselves reactions to the content of consciousness, there is a kind of self-perpetuation of feelings beyond the initiation of a particular emotional reactions to our immediate external percepts and thinking. Emotions which are reactions to the consciousness of emotions are called a syndrome (which is unlike a syndrome in the pathological sense).

A syndrome simply means, self-generating or self-feeding. Some emotions are more likely to be syndromic than others. Fear and humor usually subside as soon the conscious stimulation is over. When anxiety arises from thinking about the bills we cannot pay, or we have a serious operation coming up, even when we begin to think about something else, the feeling of anxiety often remains, because the response to that feeling is itself a kind of anxiousness. This effect often causes us to worry about the feeling and why we feel this way, especially when the original cause or causes of the feeling are no longer present in consciousness. It is why it is so important to be able to identify exactly why we are having the feelings we are having, because it is only that identification that can ultimately break the cycle of syndromic emotions.

Until that cycle is broken, some feelings may seem causeless, even mysterious; another source of the mistaken notion of the subconscious.

Physiological False Emotions

There is one characteristic of emotions which is both evidence of the fact they are physiological in nature, and are not reliable as sources of cognition. I shall address elsewhere the mistaken notion of Ayn Rand’s that the emotions are like, lightening calculators, that give us immediate experience of things in relationship to our values.

We know the emotions can be influenced greatly by a number of physical influences—such as fatigue and fever—when things that usually cause one set of feelings cause a different set of feelings or no feelings at all. Even more profound are the effects of some chemicals (drugs, for example) and both naturally existing or medically introduced hormones. These last can cause emotional reactions having nothing to do with the content of consciousness ranging from euphoria to total panic. Those with various hormone imbalances can experience depression, sadness, fear, giddiness, and many other feelings caused entirely by the effects of the hormones. Physiologically caused feelings are not true emotions, but our experience of them are often indistinguishable from the true kind, and only the most careful analysis of the content of our consciousness (what we are thinking, for example) compared with what we are feeling, possibly combined with medical examination can ascertain whether such emotions are genuine or false.

Understanding the possibility and nature of false emotions is important if we are to know how to deal with and interpret our feelings, and clears away the almost mystic notions propagated by the psychological community that relegates them to some dark mysterious subconscious dungeon.

No Mystery

The emotions are very complex and understanding one’s own emotions, what their source is in one’s values, thoughts, and experience requires very careful and ruthless examination of one’s own consciousness, but they are not some mysterious thing that comes upon us without reason or cause.