Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[bennyboy]

Audio signals get sent to the audio cortex and that is how you hear actual sound.  Visual signals get sent to the visual cortex and that is how you see actual colors and other objects.  Likewise, thoughts of value judgments get sent to the emotional parts of our brains and it is through our emotions that we are able to perceive real value.  But the audio and visual signals themselves are not any real sight or hearing just as how thoughts of value themselves in our lives cannot allow us to perceive any real value.  Therefore, that is the reason why our positive and negative emotions are like glasses we need to wear in order to see the values in our lives.  It would also be no different than if you were in a pitch black cave and you believed gold was in that cave.  That belief/mindset alone would not allow you to see the gold.  You would need actual light to see the gold.  The more light you have, the more the gold shines which means you are able to see the gold more.  The less light you have, the less the gold shines which means the less of the gold you will see.  In that same sense, our positive emotions are like the light that allow us to see the good values in our lives and our negative emotions allow us to see the bad values in our lives.

Your analogy isn't one. Our sense of good and bad is nothing like our ability to perceive a gold color.

"Good" is the word we USE for positive valuation. That the term is used, ever, in any context, means that someone has evaluated something positively. When I say, "The city engineers did a good job maintaining this road," I'm not in raptures about it. I simply know what a good road looks like, and I'm capable of identifying that fact. I can discuss the real value of the road-- that people can more easily and safely get to work-- without having an orgasm about it.

If I do heroin, I can say that I feel good. That doesn't mean that I think heroin is good, or that I value heroin as a positive player in my life.

When I tell my dog he's a "good dog," I'm not necessarily having an emotional reaction, either. I'm simply identifying to the dog that his behavior is in line with the behavior I intend to induce in him.


I don't think in 50 pages, you've precisely defined what "good," "value" or "emotions" really mean. Instead you've bounced those words constantly off each other, not realizing that you are really just juggling and re-stating definitions of those words in a variety of forms. All that busy work amounts, pretty much, to a so what? Yeah, we value good feelings. Yeah, someone without the capacity to feel wouldn't evaluate life in the way that we do. So what?