Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[bennyboy]

If your happiness is intense enough to make the suffering worth it then that's not really suffering. Suffering is when pain or unhappiness becomes bad enough... that you're suffering. It's when the pain is by definition NOT worth it. Which is why I say it's intrinsically bad.

There's a time lag, though.  In many cases, it is the suffering which motivates one to experience pleasure.  And given how the brain works, even the cessation of suffering can be pleasurable.  Is it worth a couple days of blue balls to have a mind-numbing orgasm, and impress my wife with a volcanic eruption like to pop her little head off?  Bennyboy says yes!

As for intrinsically bad. . . nope.  Offer the pain up to God.  Use it as a philosophical tool for understanding the plight of man.  Use it as an excuse to complain, which is many people's favorite hobby.  Even pain offers plenty of chance for positive attribution.

We can argue about whether pain is "worth it," but what are the criteria?  They are necessarily SUBJECTIVE, which means the badness is not in the thing itself, but in the attributions we arbitrarily apply to it.

Not. . . intrinsic. . .

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But the reason why I have said to not jump to the conclusion that I am speaking nonsense is because I am still in the process of figuring out and working out my whole worldview so that it becomes clear to others.  You are also dismissing my personal experience.  During my worst miserable moments, I have thought that the idea of getting the help I needed was something good, but that goodness was completely empty in my life.  I was still living the worst life.  This has to prove that goodness goes beyond our thoughts.  It has to be the positive emotions themselves.  I am still in the process of working and figuring this one out, too because, if positive emotions were the only things that were good in life, then we wouldn't be able to judge other things we didn't feel a positive emotion from as being good in the first place.

You are busily engaged in debating a point which you have not you finished the "process of figuring out," and you expect us to make sense of it? That expectation is intrinsically bad.

I'm all for spiritual and philosophical exploration. Rock it, talk about it, live it. Not a problem. But I happen to care what words mean, and intrinsic doesn't mean, "Bad because I think it's bad." It means the opposite of that.