Your Senses, Your Emotions, Your Morality (3rd Intl. Conference on Addiction and Psychiatry)
September 2, 2020
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as posted by the channelKeynote Presentation to the 3rd Intl. Conference on Addiction and Psychiatry, September 2020
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The proto-psychologists James and Lange have (separately) proposed that emotions are the experiencing of physical responses to external stimuli.
They are mental representations of totally corporeal reactions. Sadness is what we call the feeling of crying. This was phenomenological materialism at its worst.
To have full-blown emotions (not merely detached observations), one needed to experience palpable bodily symptoms.
The James-Lange Theory apparently did not believe that a quadriplegic can have emotions, since he definitely experiences no bodily sensations.
Sensationalism, another form of fanatic empiricism, stated that all our knowledge derived from sensations or sense data. There is no clear answer to the question how do these sensa (=sense data) get coupled with interpretations or judgements. Kant postulated the existence of a "manifold of sense" – the data supplied to the mind through sensation.
In the "Critique of Pure Reason" he claimed that these data were presented to the mind in accordance with its already preconceived forms (sensibilities, like space and time). But to experience means to unify these data, to cohere them somehow. Even Kant admitted that this is brought about by the synthetic activity of "imagination", as guided by "understanding". Not only was this a deviation from materialism (what material is "imagination" made of?) – it was also not very instructive.
The problem was partly a problem of communication. Emotions are qualia, qualities as they appear to our consciousness. In many respects they are like sense data (which brought about the aforementioned confusion).
But, as opposed to sensa, which are particular, qualia are universal. They are subjective qualities of our conscious experience.
It is impossible to ascertain or to analyze the subjective components of phenomena in physical, objective terms, communicable and understandable by all rational individuals, independent of their sensory equipment. The subjective dimension is comprehensible only to conscious beings of a certain type (=with the right sensory faculties).
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